“Give Justice Not Death”
The recent protest against capital punishment clearly demonstrate different manifests of the issue. The Law Commission of India submitted its 262nd report on the issue of ‘Death Penalty’ in India. The commission, in its report, discussed issues ranging from death penalty being a deterrent, to changing International & National scenario to arbitrariness in the decision making and existence of bias as some of the reasons for recommending abolition of death penalty except in cases of terrorism related offences. India has retained capital punishment while 140 countries have abolished it in law or in practice, India’s Law Commission report says. That leaves the South Asian nation in a club with the U.S., Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia as a country which retains it. At the moment, judges in India can impose the death penalty in the “rarest of rare” of cases, including treason, mutiny, murder, abetment of suicide and kidnapping for ransom.
Insistence on retaining death penalty will cloud India's emerging clout in the global context — in which India harbours lofty global aspirations. It is way behind other countries in key current legal and moral trends on justice related issues. For example, the UN Moratorium on Death Penalty notes that in a country like India, where trials are lengthy and decades may pass before actual execution of the verdict, those who await execution have died a thousand times already because of their anticipation of the final horror.
Similarly, in its 2012 Universal Periodic Review of India, the UN Human Rights Council recommended that India establish an official moratorium on executions and move towards abolishing the death penalty. The Council also recommended that India should commute all death sentences into life imprisonment terms. However, India did not accept any recommendations regarding the death penalty, or abide by any international moratorium or resolution that requires it to eradicate death penalty from its legal order.
The argument by India is that each nation has a “sovereign right” to determine its legal system, and to punish criminals according to its laws. This is grounded in a false assumption that such a right is absolute. By participating in a global legal system, ratifying treaties and submitting itself for global monitoring, India's “sovereign right” is fundamentally tempered. While this argument may sound politically impeccable in a national context for populist reasons; it displays blatant ignorance of a growing global trend towards the abolition of the death penalty.
Recently Yakub menon was convicted of “criminal conspiracy to carry out terrorist act” in the devastating Mumbai blasts, where thousands of families lost their loved ones. In the Indian judicial response to Mumbai blasts the Court in this hearing rejected Yakub’s application seeking suspension of his execution and reaffirmed his death sentence. Yakub's execution compels India to revisit the issue whether death penalty is sustainable in a modern democracy. In 1980, the Supreme Court of India, in Bachan Singh vs. Union of India, observed that, “the normal rule is that the offence of murder shall be punished with the sentence of life imprisonment. The court can depart from that rule and impose the sentence of death only if there are special reasons for doing so. Such reasons must be recorded in writing before imposing the death sentence.”
Moreover it is generally agreed that the death penalty has more frequently been imposed on the lower economic strata of minorities, poor, and uneducated persons.For example, of 3,857 persons executed in the U.S. between 1930 and 1966, 2,065 or 53.5 percent were blacks. Abolitionists reason that this statistic proves discrimination in the assessment of the death penalty. However, sociological criminologists suggest that the disproportionate involvement of minorities in most crimes, particularly crimes against the person, are the result of a subculture of violence and the stresses and strains imposed on a minority group living in the slums of large cities.
To add in 2013, an amendment to the law permitted death as a punishment in cases where rape was fatal or left the victim in a persistent vegetative state; as well as for certain repeat offenders.
My point to this is that while the demand for death penalty is a symptom of collective melancholia and anger, capital punishment does not help rape survivors. Many cases of rape and murder have met with capital punishment, without producing any effect of deterrence. The Demand for death penalty rests on the idea that rape reduces women to living corpses, assuming that rape survivors are permanently marked by shame and stigma. It participates in social and judicial assumption that a rape survivor has no future, since no man would want to marry such women. To insist on death penalty because women are living corpses after rape means we deny women who survive such violence the means to live a life of dignity on their own terms. This is what the call for death penalty does. Rather than argue for death penalty, we must create safer conditions of testimony, protesting and speaking out. This is one substance where I feel India needs to work upon.
By holding itself back from recommending a total abolition, the Commission has put the ball in Parliament’s court. The government and the principal opposition are unlikely to support such an abolition at this point.
