Back to life: on the belated acquittal of death row convicts
Mains Paper 2: Governance | Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important:
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: The news card talks against the death penalty. It supports the argument that there is no point of allowing death penalty.
NEWSCONTEXT
Six members of a nomadic tribe spent 16 years in prison in Maharashtra;three of them were on death row for 13 of these years.A three-judge Bench has now found that unreliable testimony had been used to convict the six men.
Supreme Court’s Judgements
In recent years, the Supreme Court has been limiting the scope for resorting to the death penalty by a series of judgments that recognise the rights of death row convicts.
A few years ago it ruled that review petitions in cases of death sentence should be heard in open court.
Deepening inequality in access to Justice
It is inevitable that the long wait on death row, either for a review hearing or for the disposal of a mercy petition, could ultimately redound to the benefit of the convicts and their death sentences altered to life terms.
In a system that many say favours the affluent and the influential, the likelihood of institutional bias against the socially and economically weak is quite high.
Also, there is a perception that the way the “rarest of rare cases” norm is applied by various courts is arbitrary and inconsistent.
Way Forward
The clamour for justice often becomes a call for the maximum sentence.
In that sense, every death sentence throws up a moral dilemma on whether the truth has been sufficiently established.
In that sense, every death sentence throws up a moral dilemma on whether the truth has been sufficiently established.
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