There has been an intense and persistent crisis in the fairness of administering the death penalty in India for many decades now that has been acknowledged in judgments of the Supreme Court of India, by former judges, lawyers, researchers, etc. At the heart of that crisis has been the concern that there is a pervasive arbitrariness in sentencing procedures that impose the death penalty, and a significant concern has been that barely any relevant information about the accused enters the courtroom during the sentencing phase. The Court’s recent judgment in Manoj and Ors. vs State of MP seeks to address this long ignored yet critical aspect of death penalty sentencing. This specific attempt in Manoj must be seen with the Court’s apparent discomfort over the last year with procedural unfairness in sentencing being carried out by the lower courts.
Individualised sentencing
The constitutionality of the death penalty was upheld in 1980 in Bachan Singh vs State of Punjab, which greatly emphasised ‘individualised sentencing’ and called upon courts to consider the ‘crime’ and the circumstances of the accused. However, since Bachan Singh there have been disagreements on which cases warrant the imposition of the death penalty and the nature of information about the accused relevant for sentencing. With a vast majority of prisoners being poor, quality legal representation has always been a concern. As a result, very little attempt is made to collect sentencing information, and very little is known about the accused while sentencing.
