Supreme Court rejects Centres plea for stricter timelines for execution of dying row convicts

The Supreme Court has dismissed the Union Government’s plea looking for stricter timelines for dying row convicts to exhaust their authorized treatments and for executions to be carried out inside seven days of the rejection of a mercy petition.

A Bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta, and N.V. Anjaria noticed that there was no benefit within the software and that the court docket’s 2014 ruling in ‘Shatrughan Chauhan v. Union of India’, which the Centre sought to switch, was exhaustive and didn’t require any clarifications.

“We don’t discover any benefit on this miscellaneous software filed by the Centre,” the Bench mentioned, including that the federal government can be at liberty to pursue a number of the measures it had proposed in acceptable proceedings.

Rights of victims

The Union Government had sought a revision of the Shatrughan Chauhan ruling to make sure that the framework governing dying penalty circumstances additionally recognised the rights and anguish of victims, other than coping with the extended delay surrounding the execution of sentences. Additional Solicitor General Okay.M. Nataraj, showing for the Centre, had argued that whereas the 2014 judgment protected the rights of convicts, it didn’t adequately account for the struggling endured by victims’ households.

During the proceedings, the court docket declined to revisit its earlier judgment, observing that the safeguards laid down in Shatrughan Chauhan required no modification. The judgment had held that undue delay in deciding mercy petitions violates a convict’s proper to life and dignity below Article 21 of the Constitution, and that such delay, by itself, constitutes a legitimate floor for commuting a dying sentence to life imprisonment.

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The Ministry of Home Affairs had filed the modification plea in 2020, after a number of authorized treatments filed one after one other by the 4 convicts within the 2012 Delhi gang rape and homicide case delayed their execution. The convicts have been in the end hanged in March 2020 after the Supreme Court, in a late-night listening to, rejected their last plea.

Deadline for healing pleas

In its software, the Centre urged the court docket to mandate that healing petitions be filed inside a set interval following the dismissal of a evaluate petition. It additional sought a clarification that mercy petitions must be submitted inside seven days of the issuance of a dying warrant. The authorities additionally requested that executions be carried out inside seven days of the rejection of a mercy plea, no matter any pending proceedings filed by co-convicts.

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The software mentioned convicts of heinous crimes similar to terrorism, rape, and homicide “take the judicial course of for a trip” below the garb of Article 21 of the Constitution. (proper to life). It emphasised that public curiosity and the deterrent impact of capital punishment should not be undermined.

While the Shatrughan Chauhan judgment recognised that undue delay in executing a dying sentence has a “dehumanising impact” and prescribed safeguards for convicts, the Centre has argued that these instructions are totally “accused-centric” and should be balanced in opposition to the rights of victims and the pursuits of society.