Capital term review, mitigation probe of death row convicts
The Kerala High Court recently took an unusual step when it ordered a ‘mitigation investigation’ of two convicts on death row before deciding whether to confirm the capital punishment imposed on them. The probe, which seeks to make capital punishment rarer, fairer, and principled, will cover the convicts’ socio-economic background, psychological conditions, and history of neglect or abuse that they may have faced growing up, among other things. The division bench comprising justices Alexander Thomas and C Jayachandran also asked the director general of prisons to file a report on the conduct of the two prisoners and the nature of work they did in prison.
The order is significant as it revisits, once again, the often ignored aspect of death penalty jurisprudence. Sure, the two prisoners who are serving death sentences have committed heinous crimes: one involves a techie convicted for murdering his female friend’s three-year-old daughter and mother-in-law and injuring her husband at Attingal in Thiruvananthapuram in 2014, while the second convict is a migrant worker from Assam who is accused of raping and murdering a law student in Perumbavoor near Kochi in 2016. The high court’s order, though rare, is not without precedent. The Supreme Court, in April last year, decided to critically examine the routine and abrupt way in which trial judges often impose death penalties on convicts. Ordering mitigation investigation, the SC bench said, “a ‘one size fit for all’ approach while considering mitigating factors during sentence should end”. The Kerala HC order quotes the Constitution bench in the celebrated Bachan Singh v State of Punjab (1980) that “though death sentence cannot be declared as unconstitutional, such an extreme punishment of death sentence for the prescribed offences can be only in the rarest of rare cases and where the alternate punishment of life sentence is unquestionably foreclosed”.
The order by the SC — and now the Kerala HC — is important as it can alter India’s death penalty jurisprudence. The order seeks to comprehensively examine the multidisciplinary wisdom relating to the crime, the criminal, and the punishment. Rightly, the court has taken a stand that every life is precious, and the fact that a person may be a murder convict does not make his life valued less. POLITICAL