Horror of crime not enough for death penalty, says apex court

Warning that the “machinery which feeds the death-penalty system is itself fragile”, the Supreme Court has held that the horror of a crime alone cannot justify sending a convict to the gallows unless the process leading to such punishment is scrupulously fair, transparent and thorough.

- Utkarsh Anand

“A Constitution that proclaims liberty and dignity as its first commitments cannot permit the State to end a human life unless every safeguard of fairness has been honoured and every civilising impulse of the law has been heard,” said a bench of justices Vikram Nath, Sanjay Karol and Sandeep Mehta.

Itcautioned that the irreversible nature of the death penalty, when grafted on to an error-prone process, risks violating Article 21's guarantee of life and liberty.

“We cannot overlook that the machinery which feeds the death-penalty system is itself fragile. Investigations often rely on confessions extracted in opacity, recoveries whose provenance is contested and forensic material of doubtful rigour. When such evidence is filtered through an overburdened trial process, the possibility of ‘wrongful conviction can never be dismissed,” the judgment said.