THERE has been an extraordinary level of activity around the death sentence in the past few years, especially since 2009. This was the year that a bench of the Supreme Court, in Santosh Bariyar’s case,¹ found that a 1995 decision of the Supreme Court in Ravji² had been in error; that it had ignored a 1980 Constitution Bench judgment which had said that it was not only the nature of the crime but also the criminal, that was relevant in deciding whether or not to impose the death sentence. That called into question the rightness of a series of decisions where the death sentence was given in the Supreme Court, as also those of trial courts and High Courts which may have taken the lead from Ravji.

In 2012, retribution surfaced as the purpose of punishment following the rape of the young woman on 16 December, the brutality with which the crime was committed, and the iconic struggle for life that preceded her dying. The secret hanging of Ajmal Kasab on 21 November 2012,³ and of Afzal Guru on 9 February 2015⁴ raised questions about the power of the state over life and death, and the violation of the procedure established by law which the state is to follow in matters of life and liberty.⁵

 

In July 2015, there was a midnight hearing that was held in the Supreme Court, clearing the way for an early morning execution of Yakub Memon.⁶ The protests in Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Kashmir at the threatened execution of Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar,⁷ Balwant Singh Rajoana,⁸ Murugan, Santhan and Arivu,⁹ and Afzal Guru¹⁰ revealed fissures that complicated the treatment of terrorism and the punishment of death.

 

On 21 January 2014, a bench of three judges of the Supreme Court commuted 14 sentences of death to life imprisonment while pronouncing on matters of delay, solitary confinement, mental illness, erroneous judgments and the effect of procedural lapses^.11 A bench ruled that when orders in death sentence cases are asked to be reviewed, they should be heard in open court and not decided by judges in chambers, as is the practice for cases generally.¹² In December 2015, the court decided that long terms of imprisonment, extending even to the rest of a lifetime, were permissible when the court was reducing the sentence of death to life, where 14 years may seem too little and the death penalty excessive.¹³

In this time, Parliament has introduced the death sentence into more legislations,14 and the President has rejected a record number of mercy petitions,¹⁵ even as a former President wrote of his surprise that most cases of clemency ‘had a social and economic bias’ and that deciding on clemency was among the more difficult tasks he had to undertake as President.¹⁶ The Law Commission (LCI), asked to help provide rationality to the ‘rarest of rare’ doctrine, has recommended the immediate abolition of the death penalty as a ‘first step’ for all crime other than ‘terrorism related offences and waging war’ – although ‘there is no penological justification for treating terrorism differently from other crimes.’¹⁷ The LCI concludes its report thus: ‘It trusts that this report will contribute to a more rational, principled and informed debate on the abolition of the death penalty for all crimes.’¹⁸ Further, it ‘sincerely hopes that movement towards absolute abolition will be swift and irreversible.’

 

The Bachan Singh decision in 198019 marked a stage in the Supreme Court’s engagement with the death sentence. The Constituent Assembly had debated the sentence, raising questions about the ‘judge-centric nature of the death penalty, arbitrariness in imposition, its discriminatory impact on people living in poverty, and the possibility of error.’²⁰ It was however decided that the desirability of the death penalty ought to be left to Parliament. In 1955, Parliament acted to make the first major move on the death penalty. Till 1955, where the death sentence was one of the alternatives provided in law, it was to be the rule, and a judge who decided to give the lesser sentence had to give ‘special reasons’ why. This requirement of providing ‘special reasons’ for not giving the death sentence was repealed in 1955.

 

In 1973, the Code of Criminal Procedure 1898 was revamped and re-enacted, and special reasons demanded where the court decides to give a death sentence.²¹ That, unfortunately, was the last time that Parliament legislated to whittle down the width and influence of the death sentence: meanwhile laws have been enacted liberally adopting the death sentence. Since then, it has been the Supreme Court which has worried itself about the death penalty, and what has to be done with it. Which explains why the 262nd Report of the Law Commission in 2015 was in response, not to a reference from Parliament (as was the 35th Report in 1967) or the executive (which is common practice), but to a cry emanating from the Supreme Court asking for help in understanding the death penalty.²²

 

In Bachan Singh, while the court did not find the death penalty unconstitutional, it felt impelled to acknowledge the perils of arbitrary and unfair sentencing. Ideas of ‘principled sentencing’ based on a determination of aggravating and mitigating circumstances paying due regard to the ‘circumstances of the offence’, and the ‘rarest of rare cases when the alternative option is unquestionably foreclosed’ were set into the judgment, producing a jurisprudence that was to profoundly impact the thinking around death penalty in the following decades.

However, by the time the LCI revisited Bachan Singh in its report on the death penalty in 2015, there was mounting disquiet that the ‘rarest of rare’ standard had not produced rationality or fairness. What the LCI did find was evidence of arbitrariness, discrimination, fallibility and even fabrication which shadowed the death penalty. Over 30 years after Bachan Singh, in case after case, the Supreme Court was to acknowledge the uneasy truth that Bachan Singh’s ‘principled sentencing’ had not worked, and that ‘sentencing has now really become judge-centric.’²³

A comparison of the decisions of three judges of the Supreme Court relating to the death penalty in the first decade of this century shows disturbing results.²⁴ Justice Pasayat dealt with 29% of the reported cases on death penalty, confirmed the death sentence in 16 of the 22 cases that he heard and decided, enhanced the sentence from life imprisonment to death in two cases, and reversed acquittal and imposed the sentence of death in two cases. That these enhanced sentences have no higher court to which the convicted person may appeal is a chilling facet of these judgments. Overlapping with this period, Justice S.B. Sinha heard 23% of the death penalty cases, and upheld the sentence in none of the 17 cases he decided. Justice K.G. Balakrishnan heard 12% of the cases, and upheld the sentence in 6 of 13 cases. In three cases, Justice Sinha held that the accused be acquitted.

 

Justice S.B. Sinha’s 2009 decision in Santosh Bariyar shook the judiciary, and those engaged with the death penalty debate. The 1995 decision of the Supreme Court in Ravji v. State of Rajasthan²⁵ had held that it was ‘the nature and gravity of the crime but not the criminal which is germane for consideration of appropriate punishment in a criminal trial.’ This was plainly contrary to the Bachan Singh principles – ignoring the nature of the person to be punished. Two accused were given the death sentence on this legally faulty reasoning. With Ravji as the new standard, seven cases that followed relied on Ravji in sentencing convicts to death. It was the Santosh Bariyar court which, in 2009, found that Ravji was a wrong decision, and all those decisions which drew their reasoning from Ravji were flawed and needed to be reconsidered. Eleven of Justice Pasayat’s death sentences, spread over five judgments, fell in this category of cases which Justice Sinha’s judgment cast in doubt.

 

It was too late for Ravji Ram and Surja Ram who, enquiries revealed, had been hanged in 1997, years before the Bariyar judgment. Among the many questions hovering unanswered around these executions is this: if no one even knew that they had been hanged, what ‘deterrence’ could that have possibly produced? If it was to incapacitate them so that they may commit no further crime, how was their dangerousness judged by only considering the nature of the crime and not the possibilities of redemption of the convict? If the judiciary was wrong in how it made its decision, how is that wrong to be remedied? When in 2012, 14 former judges of the Supreme Court and High Courts wrote to the President about the error in the judgments since Ravji, it was no hyperbole when they termed it the gravest miscarriage of justice in the history of crime and punishment in independent India.²⁶

Misapplication of the law in death penalty cases is not as uncommon as might be thought. Dhananjoy Chaterjee was a security guard who was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a 14 year old schoolgirl. He was executed on 14 August 2004, when he had spent ten years on death row. This was preceded by representations before the Supreme Court and the executive for clemency, to the accompaniment of a media spectacle featuring the hangman, children from the victim-girl’s school, the convict’s family and a dramatized ‘reconstruction’ of the crime.

Nine years after he was hanged, the Supreme Court questioned the imposition of the death sentence on Chaterjee. The convicting court had said: ‘The measure of punishment in a given case must depend upon the atrocity of the crime, the conduct of the criminal and the defenceless and unprotected state of the victim. Imposition of an appropriate punishment is the manner in which courts respond to the society’s cry for justice against the criminal.’²⁷ In Shankar Kisanrao Khade v. State of Maharashtra,²⁸ the court noticed the focus on the crime, to the exclusion of the criminal, in the 1994 Chaterjee decision. By then, Chaterjee had been executed.

 

Abdul Kalam had written about the one exception he had made in rejecting mercy and said of Chaterjee: ‘Of course there was one case where I found that the lift operator had in fact committed the crime of raping and killing the girl without doubt. In that case I affirmed the sentence.’ There was nothing in his statement to explain why he made an exception of Chaterjee whose case was based on circumstantial evidence. M.S. Sathyu’s 2012 documentary on the death penalty, The Right to Live, in which he interviews Chaterjee in jail and his father in the village, shows his impoverished background. He had been on death row for 10 years and there was nothing to indicate that he had been troublesome in jail. The one explanation that offers itself: the public sentiment whipped up by the media and the demand for execution that it stoked was, imaginably, more than could be resisted. And a court was to later notice that the nature of the criminal had not been considered, led to what then became the implication that this had led to the wrongful execution of the convict.

 

Afzal Guru was executed on 9 February 2013. Electronic evidence was a significant part of the case against Afzal. A relatively recent area in law, the law is still evolving on how electronic evidence is to be preserved, presented to a court, and what the court must look for to establish admissibility. Notably, as the court said in a decision rendered in 2014:²⁹ ‘Electronic records being more susceptible to tampering, alteration, transposition, excision, etc. without such safeguards, the whole trial based on proof of electronic records can lead to travesty of justice.’

The rules to delineate the use of electronic evidence in court are in the Information Technology Act 2000 and the corresponding amendment in the Evidence Act. In the September 2014 decision of the three judge bench in Anvar’s case,³⁰ the court was considering the amended Evidence Act in the context of the reliability of electronic evidence. The law, the court held, is that: ‘An electronic record by way of secondary evidence shall not be admitted in evidence unless the requirements under section 65B are satisfied. Thus, in the case of CD, VCD, chip etc., the same shall be accompanied by the certificate in terms of section 65B obtained at the time of taking the document, without which the secondary evidence pertaining to that electronic record is inadmissible.’

Was this done when the court relied on electronic evidence in Afzal’s case? For, in that case,³¹ the court, while dealing with computerized printouts of call records, had held: ‘Irrespective of the compliance with the requirements of Section 65-B, which is a provision dealing with admissibility of electronic records, there is no bar to adducing secondary evidence under the other provisions of the Evidence Act, namely, Sections 63 and 65. It may be that the certificate containing the details in sub-section (4) of Section 65-B is not filed in the instant case, but that does not mean that secondary evidence cannot be given even if the law permits such evidence to be given in the circumstances mentioned in the relevant provisions, namely, Sections 63 and 65.’

The Anvar court held that the Afzal judgment ‘does not lay down the correct legal position’ when it said secondary evidence was sufficient; so where did that leave the Afzal decision? And this is how the Anvar court disposed off the question: ‘It may be seen that it was a case where a responsible official had duly certified the document at the time of production itself. The signatures in the certificate were also identified. That is apparently in compliance with the procedure prescribed under Section 65B of the Evidence Act.’ What a closer examination of the evidence adduced in Afzal’s case tells a different story.

 

The LCR is replete with evidence of the arbitrariness, discrimination and fallibility in the use of the death sentence. Most insupportable is the fabrication of evidence to procure conviction, a practice that is seemingly more widespread, and acknowledged, than one may imagine. This is not to say that this is new. The incredulity of the Supreme Court at the nature of the evidence produced – a bus ticket, a piece of paper in his pocket when he was picked up at a bus terminus a month after he supposedly absconded – led the court to conclude that ‘there is no evidence at all on the basis of which conviction could be justified’, while setting aside the conviction and sentence of death that had been handed out to Balbir Singh in the Indira Gandhi assassination case, and acquitting him.32 Yet, it was on this ‘no evidence at all’ that the trial court and the high court had given him the death sentence.

 

In the 2003 Akshardham temple blasts which killed 33 and injured about 85 persons, six persons were charged, and three of them sentenced to death by the trial court and confirmed by the High Court. The Supreme Court, while acquitting the accused, laid a charge of fabrication against the investigating agencies. ‘Instead of booking the real culprits responsible for taking so many precious lives, the police caught innocent people and got imposed the grievous charges against them which resulted in their conviction and subsequent sentencing.’³³

This is no exception, as the LCR reveals. In 2006, the Supreme Court said:³⁴ ‘It is a well known fact that in our country very often prosecution implicates not only real assailants but also implicates innocent persons so as to spread the net wide.’ In a 2002 case:³⁵ ‘We could not resist but place on record that the appellant seems to have been roped in merely on suspicion and the story of the prosecution built on the materials placed seems to be neither the truth nor wholly the truth... resulting in serious and grave miscarriage of justice to the appellant.’ Then:³⁶ ‘We have noticed with pain that the four accused persons were implicated not only to mislead the court but also to provide protection to the real persons… [N]o court could convict and sentence any of the aforesaid accused.’ Yet, as the LCR records, three of the acquitted-accused had spent close to six years on death row.³⁷ It is then no surprise that the LCR concludes:³⁸ ‘In sum… the death penalty operates in a system that is highly fragile, open to manipulation and mistake, and evidently fallible.’

 

On 2 December 2015, a Constitution Bench delivered its verdict in answer to a question whether the court can substitute a sentence of death with imprisonment for the rest of a person’s natural life, or for a fixed period longer than 14 years.39 The court, by a majority of 3:2, held that an ‘expanded option’ of longer terms of imprisonment was legal. It is the reasoning that seems unheeding of the kind of evidence that the LCR has recorded; maybe there is even an oblique criticism of the LCR. Referring to ‘murders and other serious offences…. which in recent times have increased manifold’, the majority judgment says:40 ‘Even those who propagate for lessening the gravity of imposition of severe punishment are unmindful of such consequences and are only keen to indulge in propagation of rescuing the convicts from being meted out with appropriate punishments. We are at a loss to understand as to for what reason or purpose such propagation is carried on and what benefit the society at large is going to derive.’

This decision, which is derived from a focus on the crime rate, the interests of society, the ‘paramount interest to the society’, the ‘nation in peril’, and the faith that because there are few executions it is an indication that ‘under no circumstances an innocent is subjected to the capital punishment’, is difficult to reconcile with the evidence-based concerns raised in the LCR. Yet, since it is judgment of a Constitution Bench of five judges, it is likely to be some while before it is revisited and reconsidered.

 

Parliament has escaped the angst experienced by the court since the 1980s (which is when the application of Bachan Singh verdict was exercising the court) and has been liberal in its adoption of the death sentence, including in non-homicidal offences. So, for instance, the Petroleum and Minerals Pipelines (Acquisition of Right of User in Land) Amendment Act 2011 introduced the option of the death sentence for causing damage to a pipeline if there is ‘intent to commit sabotage or with such knowledge that such act is so imminently dangerous that it may in all probability cause death of any person…’⁴¹ When the 2013 Criminal Law Amendment Act included the death penalty, it overrode the views of the Justice Verma Committee which recorded ‘the views expressed on the subject by an overwhelming majority of scholars, leaders of women’s organizations, and other stakeholders… that the seeking of death penalty would be a regressive step in the field of sentencing and reformation.’⁴²

 

The LCR dedicates an elaborate chapter to ‘international trends’, raising questions about the need to retain the death sentence in India when so many countries have done away with it. By the end of 2014, ‘98 countries were abolitionist for all crimes, seven countries were abolitionist for ordinary crimes only, and 35 were abolitionist in practice, making 140 countries in the world abolitionist in law or practice.’⁴³ In 2007, the UN General Assembly called for a ‘moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty’,⁴⁴ which India has shown no desire to respect. In its place is the disquieting spectre of a party that promises to hang a man if they are voted into power,⁴⁵ and another that hangs him in a secret operation.⁴⁶

Even as the LCI agonizes about the state of the criminal justice system and lays out the evidence that inexorably leads it to raise a call for abolishing the death penalty, the court remains conflicted, and Parliament carries on like it is not its business to care about this matter of death and its constituents.

 

Footnotes:

1. Santosh Bariyar v. State of Maharashtra (2009) 6 SCC 498.

2. Ravji v. State of Rajasthan (1996) 2 SCC 175.

3. ‘Ajmal Kasab Hanged’, The Hindu, 22 November 2012 at http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-in-school/ajmal-kasab-hanged/article4121327.ece

4. Sandeep Joshi and Ashok Kumar, ‘Afzal Guru Hanged in Secrecy, Buried in Tihar Jail’, The Hindu, 10 February 2013 at http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/afzal-guru-hanged-in-secrecy-buried-in-tihar-jail/article4396289.ece

5. Anjali Mody, ‘Unanswered Questions are the Remains of the Day’, The Hindu, 10 February 2013 at http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/unanswered-questions-are-the-remains-of-the-day/article4397789.ece; Sahil Makkar, ‘Afzal’s Hanging Was Not Selective, Says Shinde’, LiveMint, 11 February 2013 at http://www.livemint.com/Politics/dtSpxsc DC7roxYk9htKaLJ/Afzals-hanging-was-not-selective-says-Shinde.html; V. Venkatesan, ‘Hanged by Stealth’, Frontline, 8 March 2013 at http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/hanged-by-stealth/article 4430835.ece; Usha Ramanathan, ‘The Disturbing Truth About an Execution’, The Hindu, 13 March 2013.

6. Yakub Abdul Razak Memon v. State of Maharashtra Writ Petition (Criminal) 135 of 2015 decided on 30 July 2015 (SC) at http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/FileServer/2015-07-31_1438358472.pdf. For an intelligence officer’s unpublished article that raised questions about Yakub Memon’s sentence, see Sheela Bhatt, exclusive, B. Raman’s unpublished 2007 article, ‘Why Yakub Memon Must Not be Hanged’, Rediff.com, 24 July 2015 at http://www.rediff.com/news/column/exclusive-b-ramans-unpublished-2007-article-why-yakub-memon-must-not-be-hanged/20150723.htm.

7. ‘Punjab CM Meets PM, Seeks Clemency for Bhullar’, Tehelka, 15 April 2013.

8. ‘Centre Stays Hanging of Balwant Singh Rajoana After Badal Meets President’, NDTV, 29 March 2012 at http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/centre-stays-hanging-of-balwant-singh-rajoana-after-badal-meets-president-473832. See also Yug Mohit Chaudhry, ‘Why Balwant Singh Rajoana Shouldn’t be Hanged’, The Hindu, 18 April 2012 at http://www. thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/why-balwant-singh-rajoana-shouldnt-be-hanged/article 3255057.ece.

9. ‘Tamil Nadu Assembly Adopts Resolution Recommending Commutation of Death Sentence’, The Hindu, 31 August 2011 at http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/tamil-nadu-assembly-adopts-resolution-recommending-commutation-of-death-sentence/article2411347.ece. For a startling revelation that should have overturned the conviction of Arivu in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, but did not, see ‘Perarivalan’s Statement in Rajiv’s Case Not Verbatim’, The Indian Express, 24 November 2013 at http://indianexpress.com/article/news-archive/web/perarivalans-statement-in-rajiv-case-not-recorded-verbatim/. The retired CBI’s officer’s statement may be viewed and heard at ‘Retired CBI Officer Thiagarajan Revealing Perarivalan Statement in Agni Paritchai, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v= pwuDagOp3sQ.

10. ‘Protest Outside Jammu and Kashmir Assembly Demanding Resolution on Afzal Guru clemency’. India Today Online, 29 September 2011 at http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/protest-outside-j&k-assembly-to-demand-resolution-on-afzal-guru-clemency/1/153028.html.

11. Shatrughan Chauhan v. Union of India Writ Petition (Criminal) 55 of 2013, 21 January 2014 at http://judis.nic.in/supreme court/imgs1.aspx?filename=41163.

12. Mohd. Arif v. Registrar, Supreme Court of India Writ Petition (Criminal) 77 of 2014, 2 September 2015 at http://judis.nic.in/supremecourt/imgs1.aspx?filename=41867.

13. Union of India v. Sriharan @ Murugan Writ Petition (Criminal) 48 of 2014, 2 December 2015.

14. Infra.

15. The Law Commission’s 262nd Report on the Death Penalty records President Pranab Mukherjee as having rejected 31 of the 33 mercy petitions that he has disposed of so far.

16. APJ Abdul Kalam, ‘Pendency of Death Cases had Social, Economic Bias’, The Times of India, 2 July 2012 at http://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/india/APJ-Abdul-Kalam-Pendency-of-death-penalty-cases-had-social-economic-bias/articleshow/14590447.cms; A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Turning Points: A Journey through Challenges, Harper Collins, 2012. Dhananjoy Chatterjee was his one exception.

17. LCR p. 218.

18. Ibid, emphasis in original.

19. Bachan Singh v State of Punjab (1980) 2 SCC 684.

20. 262nd Report of the Law Commission of India (hereafter LCR) at p.15, citing the Constituent Assembly Debates (CAD), 3 June 1949.

21. Section 354 Criminal Procedure Code 1973.

22. Santosh Bariyar, supra: ‘Credible research, perhaps by the Law Commission of India or the NHRC may allow for an up-to-date and informed discussion and debate on the subject.’ And Shankar Kisanrao Khade v. State of Maharashtra (2013) 5 SCC 546: ‘Death penalty and its execution should not become a matter of uncertainty nor should converting a death sentence into imprisonment for life become a matter of chance. Perhaps the LCI can resolve the issue by examining whether death penalty is a deterrent punishment or is retributive justice or serves an incapacitative goal... While the standard applied by the judiciary is that of the rarest of rare principle (however subjective or judge-centric it may be in its application), the standard applied by the executive in granting commutation is not known’, resulting in ‘diametrically opposite opinions.’

23. Sangeet v. State of Haryana (2013) 2 SCC 452 at para 33, cited at LCR p.109. Also Santosh Bariyar, supra, and Swami Shraddananda (2) v. State of Karnataka (2008) 13 SCC 767 at para 51.

24. This section draws upon Yug Chaudhry, ‘Uneven Balance’, Frontline, 25 August-7 September 2012, at http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl2917/stories/2012090 7291702500.htm.

25. (1996) 2 SCC 175)

26. V. Venkatesan, ‘A Case Against the Death Penalty’, Frontline, 25 August-7 September 2012 at http://www.frontline.in/social-issues/general-issues/a-case-against-the-death-penalty/article6805120.ece.

27. Dhananjoy Chaterjee v. State of West Bengal (1994) 2 SCC 220.

28. (2013) 5 SCC 546, cited in LCR p.114.

29. Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer Civil Appeal No. 4226 of 2012 dated 18 September 2014 (emphasis added).

30. Ibid.

31. State (NCT of Delhi) v. Navjot Sandhu (2005) 11 SCC 600.

32. Kehar Singh v. State (Delhi Administration) AIR 1988 SC 1883.

33. Adambhai Sulemanbhai Ajmeri v. State of Gujarat (2014) 7 SCC 716 at para 225 cited in LCR at p.157. Also see, Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association, Framed, Damned, Acquitted: Dossiers of a ‘Very’ Special Cell, 2015; Mufti Abdul Qayyum Ahmed Husain Mansuri, Eleven Years Behind the Bars, 2015.

34. Major Singh v. State of Punjab (2006) 10 SCC 499, para 15, cited at LCR p.157.

35. Ashish Batham v. State of Madhya Pradesh (2002) 7 SCC 317, para 15, cited at LCR p.158.

36. Subash Chander v. Krishan Lal (2001) 4 SCC 458 cited in LCR p.158.

37. Also see Rampal Pithwa Rahidas v. State of Maharashtra (1994) 2 SCC 685; Parmananda Pegu v. State of Assam (2004) 7 SCC 779 cited in LCR at pp.158-159; Usha Ramanathan and Bezwada Wilson, ‘The Possibility of Executing in Error’, The Hindu, 2 December 2014.

38. LCR p.167.

39. Along with which government is the appropriate government for granting remissions. This latter arose in the context of the Tamil Nadu government’s decision to release the convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case after the Supreme Court had commuted their sentences while deciding the Shatrughan Chauhan case, supra.

40. Union of India v. Sriharan @ Murugan WP (Cri) 48 of 2014, 2 December 2015, p. 67.

41. Section 15. Also see, section 375E IPC; section 364A IPC and the decision in Vikram Singh @ Vicky v. Union of India Criminal Appeal No. 824 of 2013, 21 August 2015 which upheld section 364A; section 31Aof the Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances Act as amended in 1989; section 16 of the Sashastra Seema Bal Act 2007.

42, Justice J.S.Verma (Chairperson), Report of the Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law, 2013, para 24.

43. LCR p.39.

44. LCR p.51.

45. ‘BJP Releases ‘Populist Manifesto for Delhi’, DNA, 18 November 2008 at http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-bjp-releases-populist-manifesto-for-delhi-1207600

46. ‘Afzal Hanged in Secrecy, Buried in Tihar Jail’, The Hindu, 10 February 2013; Usha Ramanathan, ‘The Disturbing Truth About an Execution’, The Hindu, 13 March 2013.