A Supreme Court (SC) bench on March 21, 2023, asked the Centre to relook at India’s method of putting to death its criminals, a method which may be more humane and dignified.
Key points
- The bench even mooted the setting up of an expert committee to relook at India’s method of putting to death its criminals.
- The Court indicated to the Centre that it needed some underlying data based on which it could examine if there was a more “humane” method of execution which would render death by hanging unconstitutional.
- The court was hearing a petition filed by advocate challenging the constitutionality of death by hanging as a mode of execution.
- Section 354 (5) of the Code of Criminal Procedure mandates that a person sentenced to death shall “be hanged by the neck till he is dead”.
- In 2018, the Centre filed an affidavit supporting death by hanging. It had not found the method of execution “barbaric, inhuman and cruel” compared to firing squads and lethal injections.
- The government had traced statistics of botched-up administration of lethal injections to condemned prisoners in the United States for 110 years to prove its point that this mode of State execution was only “designed to create an appearance of serenity and painless death”.
- Besides, if known to the public, the lethal chemical would possibly be misused.
- The government had graphically detailed the horrors of death by firing squad. How, if the shots missed the heart, the prisoners slowly bled to death.
Bachan Singh case
- The government said the death penalty is awarded only in the rarest of rare cases. There have been only three execution between 2012 and 2015.
- The court had earlier clarified that it was not questioning the constitutionality of the death penalty, which was well-settled in Deena versus Union of India judgment and the Bachan Singh case reported in 1980.
- In the landmark 1982 ruling in ‘Bachan Singh v State of Punjab’, a five-judge Bench of the Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of the death sentence by a 4:1 majority ruling.
- In its 187th report in 2003, the Law Commission of India recommended that Section 354(5) of the CrPC should be amended by providing an alternative mode of execution of death sentence by lethal injection until the accused is dead.
Modes of execution
- According to Amnesty International, 55 countries around the world have the death sentence on the books.
- Death by hanging is still the most prevalent form of execution.
- Other modes are also followed in some countries. In the United States, an intravenous lethal injection is given in every state (27 states and American Samoa) that allows the death penalty.
- Electrocution is a secondary method in some states.
- Execution by firing squad is employed in China.
- Saudi Arabia uses beheading apart from other methods.
- In India, The Air Force Act, 1950, The Army Act 1950, and The Navy Act 1957 say that execution has to be carried out either by hanging by the neck until death or by being shot to death.
