Should Capital Punishment be abolished?

Introduction: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” said Mahatma Gandhi. If we go by this phrase then it would be unjust and inhuman to impose death penalty. In India, death penalty is prescribed for murder, gang robbery with murder, abetting the suicide of a child or insane person, waging war against the government and abetting mutiny by a member of the armed forces. Capital punishment is also awarded under some anti-terror laws for those convicted of terrorist activities. Generally, courts award life imprisonment to convicts in a murder case. Only in “rarest of rare” cases, murder convicts are given death penalty. Now the questions arises what is rarest of rare case? A perfect example of rarest of rare case is of Bachan Singh case, where the Supreme Court propounded the “rarest of rare” doctrine and since then, life sentence is the rule and the death sentence the exception.
There is no statutory definition of “rarest of rare”. It depends upon facts and circumstances of a particular case, brutality of the crime, conduct of the offender, previous history of his involvement in crime, chances of reforming and integrating him into the society etc. This test is generally applied while sentencing a convict to death is whether the survival of an orderly society demands extinction of life of the person who has committed the offence and whether failure to impose death sentence on him would bring to naught the sentence of death provided under Section 302 of IPC. Pre-planned, brutal, cold-blooded and sordid nature of a crime, without giving any chance to the victim, are generally taken into account to decide whether a particular case falls within the parameters of “rarest of rare.”
Statistics: According to an Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) report — The State of Death Penalty in India 2013 — Uttar Pradesh topped the list with 370 death sentences, followed by Bihar (132). But sentences for 4,321 convicts were commuted from death penalty to life imprisonment during this period. This, of course, included many convicts who were given death penalty before 2001.
The highest number of commutation of 2,462 happened in Delhi, followed by Uttar Pradesh (458). But thousands of convicts still remain on the death row. From these statistics we can see that there is huge gap between the capital punishment and the execution.
 
Should death penalty be abolished?
From the study of history, we can see the prevalence of capital punishment since time immemorial, which includes death by hanging the offender in public, lethal injections, electrocution etc. The punishment has since been abolished by almost 139 countries of the world but India is one of the countries where capital punishment is still given preference. The reasons in favour of retaining capital punishment include safety (of society), deterrence and costs (of maintaining such criminals in the prisons). It can be seen that capital punishment is an appropriate penalty for many offenders who are perpetrators of the inhuman act of killing people with utmost impunity and disregard for human life. In India, the legal framework for use of Capital punishment is laid down in the Indian Penal Code which permits use of capital punishment for murder in the ‘rarest of rare cases’. Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code says that a person committing murder shall be punished with death, or [imprisonment for life] and shall also be liable to fine and Section 303 of the Indian Penal Code reads thus: Whoever, being under sentence of [imprisonment for life],commits murder, shall be punished with death. The sparing use of this sentence in the country is also in conformance with its obligation of judicious use of this penalty as a party to the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). There is always a huge debate which continues till date that whether capital punishment should be abolished or not. And the correct answer to this question is the punishment should be proportionate to the crime done. The answer is known to everybody but it is not practiced efficiently. For many years India has faced, and still faces, the most severe threats on account of terrorism. India was regarded as a “sponge” until the world took notice of the evolving nature and threat posed by terrorism after the terror attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. Awarding someone the death penalty for acts of terrorism is qualitatively different from awarding someone the death penalty for having committed other crimes. A criticism levelled by some against the death sentence having been awarded to Yakub reiterates the familiar argument that the death penalty as such should be abolished as it is a violation of human rights and is an inhuman and cruel form of punishment. In the seminal case of Bachan Singh, the majority judgment upheld the constitutional validity of death penalty for murder under Section 302 of the IPC. There are instances where by awarding capital punishment injustice is done.
The Supreme Court had erroneously given the death penalty to 15 people since 1996, of whom two were hanged. The judges called this “the gravest known miscarriage of justice in the history of crime and punishment in independent India.”
Some argue that the death penalty is the only way to deter heinous crime, especially violence against women and children. But a comprehensive study done last year in the United States found that there is no credible evidence that the death penalty has any deterrent effect on crime. Justice K.T. Thomas, who headed the three member bench in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, has said that executing Perarivalan, Murugan and Santhan, convicted and sentenced to death in the case, would amount to punishing them twice for the same offence, as they had already spent 22 years in jail, the equivalent of life imprisonment.
Conclusion: People sentenced to death by Indian courts face long delays in trials and appeals. “During this time, the prisoner on death row suffers from extreme agony, anxiety and debilitating fear arising out of an imminent yet uncertain execution,” the Law Commission said. It added that solitary confinement and harsh conditions imposed on prisoners were degrading and oppressive and that the Supreme Court had acknowledged that the circumstances of being on death row in India amount to “near torture” for the convict. Administration of criminal justice in India is in “deep crisis.” It cites a lack of resources, an overstretched police force and ineffective prosecution as among the reasons. As a result, the administration of capital punishment is vulnerable to misapplication. Mercy powers have failed in acting as a final safeguard against a miscarriage of justice, the report says, adding that the Supreme Court has pointed out gaps and illegalities in how courts have discharged the powers.
Opinion:  And in my opinion capital punishment should be given according to the crime done. The judiciary should improve the justice giving mechanism so that no innocent is wrongly punished and no criminal should be set free in the society in order to do justice in the country. But if capital punishment will be abolished then there is a chance for the accused to reform and come back and live in society but first their need to be check that letting the person living society is just in comparison to the crime done by him. Hence, there should be a balance between them.
SUBMITTED BY:- SHUBHANGI GUPTA.