The Hindu : Humane executions

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, May 03, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Humane executions

THE LAW COMMISSION'S proposal to do away with the practice of hanging convicts by the neck as the preferred method of executing the death sentence and instead consider administering the lethal injection is welcome regardless of the stance on the death penalty. Indeed, holding the proposal hostage to the intensely acrimonious and passionate debate on capital punishment can undermine the small but very real gains that can accrue to convicts as well as their families who, in their hour of trauma, would be anxious that their kin depart with dignity. One merely has to recall the gruesome accounts of executioners and dissenting Justices on the mutilation of bodies, the torture inflicted by multiple electric shocks, the nausea caused by burning flesh and blood at the scene of executions. It is time these horrific spectacles became a thing of the past, whether the death penalty is abolished instantly or not. The Law Commission's recommendation is likely to find favour among protagonists of the death penalty on grounds of its relatively humane and efficacious manner of carrying out executions in comparison with resorting to the electric chair and other cruder methods to achieve the same objective. But even abolitionists must seize on this small gain as a significant step in their ultimate and universal realisation of the goal of the elimination of the death penalty from the statute books.

Although India is among the few democratic countries where capital punishment is yet to be abolished, it has made considerable progress in terms of evolving a jurisprudence that is more sparing in pronouncing the death sentence and the general application of criminal laws that are less stringent. Under the Criminal Procedure Code for instance, the courts were originally required to state reasons why the death sentence was not passed in offences that were punishable with death. Today, courts are required to adduce reasons for imposing the death penalty. While the Supreme Court had laid down in 1983 that capital punishment must be awarded only in the rarest of rare cases, going further, it observed in 1986 that "a barbaric crime did not have to be visited by a barbaric penalty" and declared a direction of the Rajasthan High Court for public hanging "unconstitutional and violative of Article 21".

These are significant moves forward, notwithstanding that capital punishment is yet to be declared unconstitutional. Even as recently as in 2001, the Government announced in Parliament that it did not contemplate any change in the method of executing the death sentence by hanging by the neck. Now, the suggestion mooted by the Law Commission to review the manner of executing the sentence, if not the nature of the penalty itself, is another concrete measure. Its proposal assumes significance in view of the death sentence issued by the Delhi High Court last December on three persons convicted in the Parliament attack case and subsequent appeals against the verdict.

At another level, the Law Commission's proposal will inevitably reopen the debate on the moral and practical basis for the death penalty itself. The underlying essence of all punishment as reformative and the retributive nature of capital punishment, its highly dubious record on the score of deterrence and the appalling rate of convictions with lesser penalties, relevant as they may be, are unlikely to appeal to protagonists of the death penalty in the short term. What is significant in the medium term though, is a recognition that endorsement of humane executions does not amount to undercutting support for the campaign against the death penalty; just as it does not undermine support for capital punishment.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

Stories in this Section

A heartening course

Humane executions

Museum, memory and mankind

Empower the panel

Liberal delusion

May Day with a difference