India gang-rape sentencing: the death penalty explained

[Editor: A country which encourages SADISM and BARBARITY in the name of justice, is the domain of medieval man. It cannot be the home of modern-day homo-sapiens, who boasts of civility! Also, any form of retribution cannot be called justice, in present day world. Moreover, it is now increasingly felt that few politicians like Mr.Sushil Kumar Shinde, the Home Minister of India, Ms.Sheila Dixit, the CM of Delhi and Ms.Brinda Karat, CP(I)M Politburo member, Ms.Sushma Swaraj, BJP, Mr.Naveen Jindal, can be easily  dubbed as "POLITICAL SADISTS". Even RSS spokesman, Mr.Ram Madhav and former actresses, Ms.Ravina Tendon & Gul Panag, proved their inability to think different or are just an ordinary bunch of ogres. 
Living among such brutes, not only damages the conscience of a sane individual, but can also prompt him/her to resort to violence for the redressal of the grievances.  It is this kind of sick mentality that led to "State Sponsored Murder" of millions of people by the Joseph Stalin's  regime, in the erstwhile, USSR. Media Channels are turning Indian democracy into a "Mobo-cracy", which needs highest degree of condemnation, from the Indian Intelligentsia. Besides, only blaming the convicts, without looking a the incident in its entirety is simply, an eye-wash or sham. According to First Post, Mr.Sunil Kumar, a Delhi police inspector said in a sting operation, “No rape in Delhi can happen without the girl’s provocation.” 

The fact of the matter is that this view is held by many Indians, but most of them do not want to come out in the open, lest they get stigmatized. The girl in this case (who was raped) was reported to be loafing around in a very cold Delhi-night at 9-10 pm, when even dogs fear to move. She was allegedly with a person who was not her boy-friend. So, who was he or how was he related to this unmarried girl? The same girl went to a film with the said man, who was reported to be a software engineer, by profession. That only explains the quality of the girl, whom a group of rabid supporters, turned into some sort of "Goddess". This also gives some indication as why some girls get raped while not others--it seems no one wants to hear this inconvenient truth. 
It was even reported in a section of the media that, dying girl wished that her attackers be "burned alive", which was the practice during the middle-ages. This again clearly shows the nature of training she received from her parents. Delhi incident is sad and condemnable, but then it is equally unfortunate to see boys of early twenties being sent to gallows, in order to satisfy the wishes of a marauding crowd.  Retired Delhi High Court judge R.S. Sodhi who sentenced five people to death during his time on the bench, now opposes the death penalty. "A life sentence is the biggest sentence you can give. Imagine rotting for the rest of your life in jail," he said. 

It is a view echoed by some women's rights groups and legal experts who oppose executing the physiotherapist's attackers. Others invoke the Gandhian principle that "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind". "Public opinion and particularly media channels are adding fuel to the fire. It is putting the judiciary on the back foot," said Colin Gonsalves, a lawyer who has appeared in the Supreme Court and is founder director of the Human Rights Law Network. 

In November, India ended what many human rights groups had interpreted as an undeclared moratorium on capital punishment when it executed an Islamic Terrorist, convicted for the 2008 militant attack on Mumbai. Three months later, it hanged a man from the Kashmir region for a 2001 militant attack on parliament. "In the past year, India has made a full-scale retreat from its previous principled rejection of the death penalty," said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch. She called for the complete abolition of the death penalty. 

Comments on social media websites and elsewhere suggest that popular opinion is in favour of executing the men, although a survey by CNN-IBN-The Hindu newspaper in July showed Indians were divided on the merits of capital punishment. Earlier, Defence counsel A.P. Singh urged Judge Yogesh Khanna to ignore the clamour for the death penalty, which he said was a "primitive and cold-blooded and simplistic" response. There is a myth going on that, only harsh laws can make a country free of crimes. Yes, to some extent it can achieve the objective, but in the process, such brutalization of societies, generates its own vicious side-effects, as is enumerated by social scientists all over the world. My only question to the supporters of Capital Punishment: Did Rape and Murder stop after the hanging of Dhananjay Chatterjee in Kolkata, India, in a similar case?]

• An unofficial eight year moratorium came to an end last year when the first of two executions took place, Mohammad Ajmal Amir Kasab - convicted of involvement in the 2008 Mumbai gun attack. The second, in February 2013, Muhammad Afzal - convicted of plotting the 2001 attack on India’s Parliament. The quick succession of the two executions, coupled with the Supreme Court’s ruling in regards to capital punishment earlier this year, has raised the awareness of controversy surrounding India’s penal system.
• Capital Punishment has been part of Indian law since the colonial era, officially 1860. At present the hading down of a death sentence rests entirely on the judges’ discretion. Trial by jury was abolished in 1962.
• The 1973 Code of Criminal Procedure states that those sentenced to death should be hung until dead. (Previous methods have included being crushed by an elephant, impaling and being shot from a cannon.) In 1983 the Supreme Court rather ambiguously ruled that the death penalty should only ever be applied in ‘the rarest of rare cases’. At the same time the court overruled the challenge to means of execution on the grounds that hanging did not involve torture, barbarity, humiliation or degradation.
• Spring of 2013 saw the most recent of amendments when rape resulting in death or a permanent vegetative state of the victim was introduced. Other crimes that are punishable by death include murder, terrorism, treason, and espionage. Those people under eighteen at the time of the crime, pregnant women and people deemed mentally retarded or ill are excluded from receiving the death sentence.
• Before a prisoner can be executed the sentence has to be confirmed by India’s High Court. Convicts are allowed to appeal both sentence and conviction. Those tried first tried in a lower court may appeal to the High Court and those tried in the High Court may appeal to the Supreme Court. Once all appeals have been exhausted death row prisoners can submit a final appeal for clemency, known as a mercy plea, to India’s president. Such pleas can be granted by the State Governor and the President of India, resulting in suspension, pardon, or commutation of death sentences.
• In the reverse, the state is allowed to call for a harsher sentence. Requests for the death sentence, when it has not been previously handed down, can be submitted to the High Court.
• The length of time spent waiting on death row, as well as the number of people actually executed annually, has raised arguments about the use of the death sentence as a punishment. Many prisoners can spend more than a decade waiting either for their sentence to be confirmed or for a decision on their mercy plea. Lawyers have used this as an argument against the death sentence stating that it is unfair and illegal for prisoners to be kept waiting to die for so long. The sentence was death and not life in prison. Similarly the Indian penal code technically allows any prisoner waiting more than five years to contest their sentence. 
• In 2012 Indian courts suffered from two noteworthy embarrassments. Fourteen retired Judges asked for thirteen cases of the death penalty to be commuted after admitting the original sentence was handed down per incuriam (out of error or ignorance). In the same year it was revealed that president Pratibha Patil had, during the course of her five-year term, commuted the sentence of a rapist who had died five years previously.
• The Asian Centre for Human Rights recently completed a study on India’s Capital Punishment calling into question the application of ‘rarest of the rare’. They found that between 2001 and 2011 1, 455 convicts were sentenced to death, an average of one less than every third day.
• Capital Punishment is currently practiced in 58 countries, including USA, Japan, Belarus, Cuba, and Singapore. As of 2012 there are 97 abolitionist states. According to Amnesty International the worst offenders in 2012 were China (1000+ deaths), Iran (314+) and Iraq (129+). The organisation confirmed 1, 722 death sentences and 682 executions (excluding China) in 2012.
• Some of the current more popular means of execution are electrocution, lethal injection and hanging. Stoning is common practice in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia decapitated four men as recently as 2007.
• In the past more unusual methods have been used. Boiling, legalised by Henry VIII; although Uzbekistan boiled two political dissidents in 2002. Being hung, drawn and quartered was the penalty for high treason in England. Immurement, being locked and left within an enclosed space, was used across Europe and Asia. Dismemberment, usually by being attached to objects moving in opposite directions, was common throughout the Middle Ages, as was disembowelment.

Courtesy: The Telegraph and with inputs from the Reuters