Death penalty still mired in controversy

NEW DELHI: The controversial extreme penalty of death in India doesn't carry a stable reputation as it depends on the judge who orders hanging rather than the illustrative definition of "rarest of rare" category which allows the retributive punishment.

During the past year, the Supreme Court that takes a final decision on capital punishment in a case, awarded four death sentences in two cases. It includes a young woman and her husband, and two friends aged 22 years.

But judges showed leniency to another man facing the maximum punishment for setting ablaze the five-year-old son of his employer. Judges didn't find it a rarest of rare case. The judges ordered imprisonment for life to this convict.

Just then, judges also commuted the extreme penalty of death into life imprisonment for a farmer who raped and murdered his neighbour's seven year-old daughter.

Justifying their decision, the apex court observed: "The manner in which the girl was raped may be brutal but it could have been a momentary lapse on the part of the accused, seeing a lonely girl at a secluded place."

Though there has been an intense dialogue on the efficacy of the irretrievable death sentence, there's also expected anxiety to know whether those whose mercy petitions have been rejected by the President have been executed or not.

The home ministry says that during the last decade, the President has rejected seven mercy petitions and commuted the sentences of two, while in the previous decade, out of 45 petitions, 41 were rejected and four commuted.

Only one person -Dhananjoy Chatterjee of West Bengal - was executed between 2000 and 2006 out of more than 500 death sentences awarded during that period.

According to another government source, the President is seized of at least 23 mercy petitions by condemned prisoners including Jaishe-e-Mohammed activist Mohammad Afzal (Parliament attack accused).

Home minister Shivraj Patil says these 23 mercy petitions are related to 44 condemned prisoners. While two petitions were less than a year old, eight mercy pleas were at least three years old and 13 similar petitions were over three years.

Even as the SC has held that a mercy petition must be disposed of expeditiously, preferably within a "reasonable time", the government says the home ministry takes at least four years to dispose of the pea for clemency.

The government's criteria to judge a mercy petition rests on factors such as   “personality of the accused, age, sex or mental deficiency or circumstances of the case, medical abnormality falling short of legal insanity”.