Centre sits on mercy petitions, convicts benefit
The Supreme Court's directive to the Government to settle mercy pleas of death row convicts in a time-bound manner has not come a day too soon, as inordinate delays in executing a death sentence have become the ground for commuting it to a life term. While setting aside the death sentence of 15 convicts, the apex court ruled on Tuesday that if the Government had taken an excessive and unwarranted amount of time to decide on the mercy petition of a death row convict, the latter's resultant prolonged imprisonment was a violation of his fundamental right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution. This, therefore, is reason enough to reduce the death penalty to a life sentence, irrespective of the gravity of the crime committed. The verdict, given by a Bench headed by Chief Justice P Sathasivam, overrules the Supreme Court's April 2013 judgement that such a delay cannot be a ground for reducing the death penalty. Now, convicts who deserved no less than to face the hangman's noose will now serve a lesser term — simply because the Government did not carry out their sentences on time.
The first set of beneficiaries includes four aides of the notorious forest brigand and sandalwood smuggler Veerappan, whose death sentences were commuted on Tuesday. The gang had filed their mercy petitions in 2004 and then had to wait nine years before the Government decided to reject their pleas. Tuesday's ruling will also have consequences for other high-profile in-mates who have been on the death row for decades. These include the assassins of Rajiv Gandhi, and Khalistani terrorist Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar. While the former had appealed for mercy 11 years ago, their petition was denied by the President only in 2011; and even after that, they have spent another three years behind bars. In Bhullar’s case, his mercy petition has been pending for a decade. Now, all four of them and others of their ilk — men convicted of the rarest of rare crimes including murder of family members, the assassination of a sitting Prime Minister, large-scale terror attacks — will be spared the gallows, even though they hardly deserve the mercy.
However, these cases of immediate concern notwithstanding, it is to be hoped that the Government will now take immediate steps to put together a framework for death-row petitions. If, after going through the entire judicial process, an individual is found guilty of a heinous crime and handed the death sentence, there is no reason why his or her case should not be taken to its logical conclusion. Yet, for far too long, the Government has exploited the open-ended nature of the appeals process to avoid the execution of death sentences — mostly for political purposes and occasionally to fend off pressure from the human rights brigade at home and abroad. Either way, this is a subversion of justice at multiple levels. letting death row convicts rot in prison not only means that the worst of criminals are not being made to pay to the fullest extent for their crimes, it also takes the sting out of the deterrence argument, besides unnecessarily burdening the public exchequer. Finally, it is also violates the rights of the convict who is effectively tortured for years before he is executed, if at all.