Justice must be victim-centric to be a deterrent
With the nation’s attention focused on the deadly coronavirus, the execution last week of four convicts in the gang-rape and murder of a young physiotherapist on a running bus in Delhi did not get as much news space as it would have otherwise drawn. In December 2012, national outrage over Nirbhaya’s fate had created a political and social upheaval and made it a test case for the country’s resolve to award deterrent punishment to the guilty to make India safe for women. But in a blatant mockery of justice, all four exploited legal loopholes to buy time, including the jail manual that does not allow staggered hanging if there are multiple convicts on death row in a case.
Their execution on March 20 brought closure to Nirbhaya’s family—her anguished mother Asha Devi had pressured the judiciary and the executive to expedite the punishment—making it retributive justice as far as they were concerned. However, to make the death penalty a deterrent for heinous crimes, the Centre in January last approached the Supreme Court to revisit the norms it had set in the Shatrughan Chauhan case in 2014, where it commuted the capital punishment awarded to 15 convicts to life. One of the grounds for the ruling was the President’s delay in disposing of mercy petitions.
Interestingly, the bench that pronounced the verdict, which was hailed as humanitarian, included former CJI Ranjan Gogoi, who has since entered the Rajya Sabha and taken aim at half-a-dozen activist lawyers who “hold judges to ransom”. But the 2014 guidelines under Article 21 (Right to Life) are entirely convict-centric, the Centre’s petition argued, while suggesting execution of the sentence within a week of rejection of the mercy petitions by the President. The SC agreed, saying convicts were indeed taking the criminal justice system for a ride. While the debate on the efficacy of capital punishment is understandably polarising—India is among the 60-odd countries where it is still awarded and close to 760 have been hanged in independent India so far—there is no denying that the system ought to be victim-centric. That alone would give deterrence a chance.