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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Law panel split on eliminating death penalty

Law panel split on eliminating death penalty

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published Published on Sep 1, 2015   modified Modified on Sep 1, 2015
-The Times of India

NEW DELHI: The Narendra Modi government has strongly favoured retention of the capital punishment with the two government-appointed nominees submitting their dissent notes on the Law Commission's recommendation on phased abolition of death penalty.

The panel, in its 242-page report submitted to the government and the Supreme Court on Monday, recommended abolition of death penalty for all crimes other than terrorism-related offences and waging war against the country.

Releasing the report, law commission chairman Justice A P Shah said the recommendation by the nine-member panel was not unanimous as the two ex-officio members—law secretary P K Malhotra and legislative secretary Sanjay Singh—submitted their dissent notes besides one full-time member of the commission, Justice Usha Mehra. All three favoured retention of capital punishment.

Justice Shah said the law commission report is intended "to contribute to a more rational, principled and informed debate on the abolition of the death penalty for all crimes" but hoped that the movement towards absolute abolition will be swift and irreversible.

"The capital punishment enterprise as it operates in India perpetrates otherwise outlawed punitive practices that inflict pain, agony and torture which is often far beyond the maximum suffering permitted by Article 21," the report said. The debilitating effects of this complex phenomenon imposed on prisoners can only be called a living death, it added.

"While the illegalities pertaining to death row phenomenon in a particular case may be addressed by the writ courts commuting the death sentence, the illegal suffering which the convicts have been subjected to while existing on death row casts a long shadow on the administration of penal justice in the country," it said.

READ ALSO: Law panel wants 'gradual' stop to death penalty except in terror cases Justice Shah cited several judgments of the apex court which had observed even the selection of "rarest of rare" cases has become "judge-centric, arbitrary and unprincipled". He quoted the 2009 decision of the SC in the Bariyar case where the judges observed that "the threshold of the rarest of rare cases has been most variedly and inconsistently applied by various high courts as also this court. This has given rise to a state of uncertainty in capital sentencing law which clearly falls foul of Constitutional due process and equality principle".

Law secretary Malhotra, in his dissent note, however, justified the retention of capital punishment saying, "While there cannot be two opinions that the rights of the accused are to be respected, it is the victims and the society whose rights should get precedence over the rights of the accused."

Malhotra said there are instances where convicts serving a life imprisonment are granted parole and soon return to their old ways of harming the society.

Legislative secretary Sanjay Singh argued how through several judgments, different benches of the apex court had upheld the Constitutionality of the death sentence. "The capital punishment acts as a deterrent. If death sentence is abolished, the fear that comes in the way of people committing heinous crimes will be removed, which would result in more brutal crimes," he said.

Malhotra elaborated on the justification for retention of the death penalty. He said recently the government introduced anti-hijacking bill in Parliament wherein it has proposed death penalty relating to certain offences of hijacking.

He said the law was amended based on the Beijing Protocol dealing with anti-hijacking law, and this was supported by the Parliamentary standing committee.

The Times of India, 1 September, 2015, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Law-panel-split-on-eliminating-death-penalty/articleshow/48751624.cms


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