Beyond Mercy Petition

M. N. Das of Assam registered in mind only today, about 16 years late; he was condemned to be murdered by the state in 1997. I am not crying over spilt milk.

But, what the Supreme Court of India said, as you can read in the image above, disconcerted me. I refer to the last paragraph in the news item [1].

The court seems to discern a difference between the mental conditions of the condemned at the conclusion of one phase of the process and the pendency of the subsequent phase. The first phase is the appeals process and its end: “When appeals against death sentences are rejected, the prisoner is in ‘mental agony’”.

The subsequent phase refers to the mercy petition to the President of India: “[D]elays in deciding mercy petitions actually 'keeps alive the ray of hope in the condemned prisoner,'" the judgment noted.

The first part, “mental agony” part, I have nothing to comment on. But, look at the second part. The review petition was occasioned by the “inordinate delay” in the president deciding on it.  And, as I understand, the current judgment, particularly the segment as cited above, seems to give the lie to earlier judgments that such delays result in inflicting mental torture on the condemned, and therefore it cannot be valid in the eye of “due process”. Here in the current judgment it is claimed that the delay in deciding on the mercy petition is a boon to the condemned, longer the better.

Go figure.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Reference

1.    Centre’s plea to review commuting death to life term rejected, J. Venkatesan, The Hindu, August 10, 2013