End death penalty and endless death row

The Supreme Court’s commuting to life imprisonment the death sentence of 15 convicts whose mercy petitions had been rejected, and also setting down guidelines on the rights of death-row prisoners, should be seen as a step towards abolishing capital punishment in India. The global arguments against the death penalty range from the somewhat abstract —but critical — issue of how far a state is justified, in purely moral-legal terms, to take a life, even that of a hardened criminal, to statistical studies which try to prove that the death penalty does not quite mean a reduction in crime.

In India, there is the added factor of rank abuse of law: often, death row convicts are from the poorer sections of society, with no real knowledge of even extant rights provided to them and arbitrariness and inconsistency abound, with courts handing out different sentences for crimes ostensibly of a similar nature.

Indeed, while just a handful of countries now remain who have not yet abolished capital punishment, there is even more reason for the death penalty to be abolished in India, given the lacunae in the justice delivery system. The argument could even be made, as the Supreme Court basically has in this case, that inordinate delay in carrying out a death sentence is reason enough for that sentence to be commuted.

The notion that a death row prisoner, even if it be a brutal terrorist, is to be stripped of all rights actually means that the state that behaves thus is contravening the spirit of its own declared constitutional principles.

That iteration of the rights of death row convicts should logically lead to the eventual scrapping of capital punishment in India. The “rarest of the rare” logic often just doesn’t work in practice. It is time to abandon that logic altogether.