Context

Last week, a little over 13 years after the blasts in 2008 (in July) in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, the designated court to conduct a speedy trial decided the fate of 78 of the accused people. Within a week, the court sentenced 38 of 49 people to death.

The debate on the death sentence

• The death sentence grants the state the monopoly of violence.
• This monopoly is justified by claiming that such a step prevents crime or that it is a measure of long-due justice.
• Use in ‘rarest of rare’ case: Fundamentally, ‘rarest of rare’ is a standard that allows a court of law to use public sentiment as a judicially reliable standard in handing out the death sentence.
• Proportionality test: India’s carceral criminal jurisprudence requires a court to calculate proportionality between crime and punishment.
• But a death sentence is a sentence that goes beyond the confines of these calculations to deprive a person of their life — committing an act whose central value itself is immeasurable.
• The impossibility of reform, the heinous nature of the crime, the shock to the public conscience, none of these things sufficiently justify the right of a fallible institution to take someone’s life.

Mitigating arguments

• After the verdict is delivered in any criminal trial, lawyers make what are called ‘mitigating arguments’ — essentially to contextualise the convict as an individual and not as the accused.
• Unlike other trial stages where a court adjudicates between competing legal identities of an accused, the complainant, etc., in mitigation, the court hears evidence of a person’s humanity. 
• Hearing mitigating circumstances requires — however temporarily — for the trappings of distance and formality to be stripped away so that a court may see a person instead of a convict.

The issue in the above case

• In this case, first, the court orally convicted ‘en masse’ several of the accused instead of declaring the charges proved against them separately.
• The prosecution argued that the defendants should argue for mitigation before it would even disclose which convicts it intended to seek the death sentence.
• The role attributed to each of the accused was different.
• By equating them for mitigation purposes (individual circumstances were unaccounted for and context and circumstances were considered to be the same) and handing down a mass death sentence, the court has only opened the door for greater misuse of a questionable power to end a life without any oversight.

Conclusion

A permanent sentence requires us to assume that our institutions are infallible and user-proof. To cast this as a simple ‘penalty’ ignores what it truly does — and did in this case; it negates the individual for the final time.

UPSC 2022 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)

Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024

Attend Now