In a recent case, a Bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justices Arijit Pasayat, P. Sathasivam and Mukundakam Sharma has held that capital punishment should be awarded only in cases where life imprisonment is altogether inadequate for the crime such as “when the murder is committed in an extremely brutal, grotesque, diabolical or dastardly manner so as to arouse intense and extreme indignation of the community; when the victim is an innocent child, or a helpless woman or an old or infirm person or a person vis-à-vis whom the murderer is in a dominating position.”

Continuing in the same vein, the Court said, “It is the nature and gravity of the crime, but not the criminal, which are germane to consideration of appropriate punishment in a criminal trial. … The court will be failing in its duty if appropriate punishment is not awarded for a crime which has been committed not only against the individual victim but also against the society to which the criminal and the victim belong. … The imposition of appropriate punishment is the manner in which the court responds to society’s cry for justice against the criminal. Justice demands that courts should impose punishment befitting the crime so that the courts reflect public abhorrence of the crime.”

These observations were made in a case in which the Court confirmed the death sentence of a man, Mohan Anna Chavan, who had raped and murdered two minor girls on December 13, 1999, a mere five months after his release from prison. The man had earlier been convicted for having raped minors as well — he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on June 12, 1989 for kidnapping and raping a minor girl and on July 28, 1989, he was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for raping another minor girl.

For raping and murdering the two minors, he had been sentenced to death by the Trial Court and the Bombay High Court then confirmed the sentence.

The Supreme Court said, “Any liberal attitude by imposing meager sentences or taking too sympathetic a view merely on account of lapse of time in respect of such offences will result-wise be counter-productive in the long-run and against societal interest which needs to be cared for and strengthened by a string of deterrence inbuilt in the sentencing system. If for the extremely heinous crime of murder, perpetrated in a very brutal manner without any provocation, the most deterrent punishment is not given, the case of deterrent punishment will lose its relevance.”

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