Not Our Effort To Make Death Penalty "Redundant": What Supreme Court Said

Supreme Court: The top court dealt in detail with the legal arguments often used by death row convicts on the issue of sentencing.

The judicial process would be compromising on its objectivity if the approach is to find ways to avoid awarding death penalty in cases where they passed the muster of judicial scrutiny, the Supreme Court said on Friday.

The top court, while awarding the death penalty to a man for kidnapping, raping, and killing a seven-and-half-year-old mentally and physically challenged girl in 2013, dealt in detail with the legal arguments often used by death row convicts on the issue of sentencing.

The Supreme Court said it has never been the effort of the courts to somehow make capital punishment “redundant and non-existent for all practical purposes.” “The quest for justice in such cases, with death sentences being awarded and maintained only in extreme cases, does not mean that the matter would be approached and examined in the manner that death sentence has been avoided, even if the matter indeed calls for such a punishment.

“The judicial process, in our view, would be compromising on its objectivity if the approach is to nullify the statutory provision carrying death sentence as an alternative punishment for major offences (like that of Section 302 IPC), even after it has passed the muster of judicial scrutiny and has been held not unconstitutional,” said a bench of justices A M Khanwilkar, Dinesh Maheshwari and C T Ravikumar.