SC agrees to a PIl’s contention that in-chamber judgement is violative of Article 21
In a matter of life and death, the Supreme Court on Tuesday decided to grant death-row convicts a 30-minute extra time to argue their review petitions in open court.
So far, the review petitions used to be decided by judges in chambers with exceptions in the cases where these were listed in open court. Some death-row convicts challenged this practice as being violative of Article 21 (Right to life and liberty) of the Constitution and demanded that the review petitions involving death penalty must be listed in open court and lawyers of the convict should be allowed to argue the case.
A Constitution Bench accepted this argument by a 4:1 majority and held that henceforth review petitions of death-row convicts will be listed in open court before a three-judge bench that dealt with the case.
“We feel that a limited oral hearing even at the review stage is mandated by Article 21 in all death sentence cases,” said a Bench of Chief Justice RM lodha, JS Khehar, AK Sikri and Rohington F Nariman, comprising the majority view.
It even fixed a limit of 30 minutes for the lawyer to point out any material error in the order of the court that may result in the miscarriage of justice. Only on this ground, a review petition is maintainable. “When it is a question of life and death of a person, even a remote chance of deviating from such a decision while exercising the review jurisdiction would justify oral hearing in a review petition,” the majority verdict held. The lone judge to take a dissenting view was Justice J Chelameswar, who held that decision with regard to hearing of review petition should be best left to the court deciding the matter.
The benefit of this ruling will be available to all death-row convicts in future and in pending review petitions before the Supreme Court. Even those death-row convicts whose review petitions have been dismissed can file another review petition within one month. However, the judgment will not be applicable to cases where the death-row convicts had lost the highest remedy of curative petition in the Supreme Court. This has been done with the aim to avoid clogging of cases in the apex court and prevent reopening of decided cases.
Writing the majority view, Justice Nariman said since death penalty is irreversible in nature, and the “fact that different judicially trained minds can arrive at conclusions which, on the same facts, can be diametrically opposed to each other, we feel that if the fundamental right to life is involved, any procedure to be just, fair and reasonable should take into account the two factors mentioned above.”