Let hardened criminals live in jail till death

There is always lurking suspicion on the enforcement of judgments passed by the courts in India, the Supreme Court is no exception. The laudatory rulings penned in the strongest possible articulation might make people feel great with the feeling that at least someone has felt their long-standing grief, but as the time passes by new verdicts come into play and earlier directions invariably find place in a variety of intervention applications or contempt proceedings.

However, the sordid state of execution of judicial orders is also due to the fact that there is inordinate delay at the dispensation stage. Certain landmark mandatory recommendations have come in the writ petitions which had been filed at least a decade back. It’s trite inordinate delay is as much traumatic as prolonged wait for death in a solitary cell. Quick dispensation in all respects works as a deterrent but when it’s commonly believed that court proceedings only benefit the wrong doer either in criminal law or the civil or service matters, justice itself is reduced to a laughing stock.

When the Supreme Court pronounced sentence for death to Pakistani terrorist Ajmal Kasab who killed scores of innocent people and grievously injured many in Mumbai four years ago, the unanimous concern expressed by the commoners was: for how many more years will the most-hated man be kept alive by the government?

To buttress this apprehension, they would list several cases in which people who have committed the most heinous murders in equally diabolic manner have been serving the sentence for life even though legally they ought to have been hanged.

The government that cannot speed up the execution process in deference to court’s wishes can only be defined as a rule that believes in exercising its discretionary powers in an arbitrary manner. Discretion cannot be exercised indiscriminately, and arbitrariness is anathema to the rule of law.

It’s time that the recent ruling by a court in Ahmedabad awarding life sentence to Naroda Patiya murders convict Babu Bajrangi with a rider that he will serve the punishment till his death in the jail, was made absolute in all the heinous offence cases.

It was in the case of swami Shraddhananda, who had committed a number of heinous offences including murders and rape, that a top court bench of justices BN Agrawal, GS Singhvi and Aftab Alam said the court can substitute life imprisonment for death sentence. The so-called swami whose real name is Murli Manohar Mishra ‘shall remain in jail till death’.

But this special category of sentence may best serve the cases that by no stretch of imagination can be classified as terrorism. It may be dangerous to apply ‘life till death’ penology for the confirmed terrorists who are found to have waged a war against the country by terror tactics. Terrorists belong to a class of organised group whose members work in tandem to annihilate the unknown people within or outside a country. There is no personal motive against those gunned down by them or killed in explosions.

The rarest of rare criminality in domestic Indian penal domain is altogether distinguishable. There’s a strong or minor motive for committing the crime against known person/s.

The sentence for ‘life till the death’ is best suited to a country which, though swears by the rule of law and speedy justice, in reality has gained the notoriety of being a country where top priority matters are left to gather dust.

In order to ensure that the finality is accorded to a judicial order that has been tested by two subordinate courts, the trial court and the high court, it is of utmost importance that the executive is denuded of its statutory powers to grant reprieve. It’s because of this power that the political executive facilitate the premature release of  bahubalis, goons, and criminals acting as political activists.

 b_rakesh@dnaindia.net