Lapse of Reason

The quantum of penalty awarded to a convict often depends on judges’ perception of the crime, rather than its severity

- Jeevan Prakash Sharma

IN 2006, a Supreme Court bench of justices S.B. Sinha and Dalveer Bhandari commuted the death term of Amrit Singh, then 33, who was convicted of rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl three years earlier in a Punjab village. Both the trial court and the high court had held it to be a fit case for death sentence but the top court thought otherwise. “The manner in which the deceased was raped may be brutal, but it could have been a momentary lapse on the part of appellant (convict), seeing a lonely girl at a secluded place,” Justice Sinha had said in the judgment, converting the death sentence to life term.

In 2004, Dhananjoy Chatterjee, 39, was hanged at the Alipore jail in Calcutta for a similar crime— the rape and murder of a minor at her home in 1990. He was a guard of the apartment where the girl lived.“The courts must not only keep in view the rights of the criminal but also the rights of the vic­tim of a crime and society at large while considering the imposition of appropriate punishment,” an SC bench of judges Madan B. Lokur and K.S. Radhakrishnan had said while uph­olding the death sentence to convict.

The two cases are classic examples of how judges assess the severity of a crime in their own way, often leading to different degrees of punishment for crimes of similar nature. Such drastic variations have been apparent in hun­ dreds of judgments that the apex court has delivered over a period of time, legal experts say. The argument of “momentary lapse” of reason is often applied to rape and murder cases to lessen the punishment, they add. As a debate rages in the country over the “delay” in hanging four convicts in the 2012 rape and murder of a 22­year­old paramedic in Delhi, the spotlight is firmly on the judiciary in view of the flurry of petitions filed by the guilty.