UPSC REVISION: DEATH PENALTY - DOES IT HELP?

27 Death Penalty

Recent Instances:

1. Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh suggested the death penalty for first-time drug offenders

2. 2016, the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar introduced the death penalty for illicit liquor trade

3. BJP MP Subramanian Swamy moved, and then withdrew, a private member’s Bill in the Rajya Sabha for death penalty for cow slaughter

4. Presidential ordinance was introduced by the Union government to impose the death penalty for the rape of girls under 12 years of age

5. Uttarakhand High Court recommended that the State introduce the death penalty for cases of child rape.

6.  ‘Monstrous,’ ‘beastly,’ ‘diabolical’ and ‘unfathomable’ have been used (by Judges) to refer to offenders. This language is then read with approval across television studios in India, feeding the public with an idea of the other against whom violence is the only means of justice.

FAVOUR – DEATH PENALTY

1. Neither the court nor the Union government has defended the punishment of death beyond the simplistic ‘fear of the law’.

AGAINST – DEATH PENALTY

1. JS Verma, who overhauled the laws on gender violence, and was also the chief justice of India and head of the National Human Rights Commission, was against the death penalty.

2. 262nd report, the Law Commission of India recommended abolition of the death penalty for all crimes other than terrorism-related offences and waging war — offences affecting national security.

3. In the 1980 Bachan Singh vs State of Punjab case, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of the death penalty. The apex court, however, said that it should be used only in the “rarest of rare” cases. THERE IS A LOT OF SUBJECTIVITY IN DEFINING RAREST OF THE RARE

4. While the majority judgment opined that death penalty was a deterrent to murder, was Justice Bhagwati had a different take on the matter. Quoting George Bernard Shaw, he said: . “Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another but similars that breed their kind.”

“Criminals do not die at the hands of law. They die at the hands of other men. Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination since there it is invested with the approval of the society.

5. Despite an initial death sentence by a fast-track court on the rapists just months after the December 2012 crime, the number of reported rape cases has only increased.

6. “The evidence of any deterrent value of death penalty is extremely sketchy, and the arbitrariness with which judges decide rarest of rare makes it very problematic,” says lawyer Mihira Sood who assisted the Justice J.S. Verma Commission. “Hanging these men will achieve nothing that life imprisonment could not achieve.

7. Death penalty will not address the root causes of sexual violence: patriarchy and misogyny.

8. The new rape laws following Nirbhaya have resulted in unanticipated anomalies. For instance, increasing the age of consent from 16 to 18 has resulted in a large number of rape cases being reported by irate parents. A 2014 study conducted by The Hindu found that in Delhi, a third of all rape cases under trial dealt with consenting couples where the woman was under 18 and the parents had accused her boyfriend of rape.

9. ALLOWS GOVERNMENT TO ABDICATE ITS RESPONSIBILITY BY CLAIMING DISPENSATION OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.

10. The death penalty is premised on the state having a superior moral authority to take life. Many nations, finding this medieval, have revoked the death sentence. This hasn’t caused heinous crimes in their precincts to spiral, just as the death penalty for the December 16 accused hasn’t deterred others; 2016 NCRB data shows reported rapes rising from 3,37,922 in 2014 to 3,46,000 in 2015.

NEGATIVE IMPACT ON SOCIETY:

Death penalty and judicially expressed disgust (monstrous/beastly/unfathomable) à leads to à “a reactionary retributive attitude transforming itself into dehumanisation of human beings”.

REAL QUESTIONS:

1. WHY DESPITE TOUGHER LAWS, RAPE CONTINUES?

2. WHY ARE SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT SUBJECTED TO PUBLIC SCRUTINY?

3. With only one in four rape trials resulting in conviction, what can be done to increase conviction rates?

4. What steps have governments taken to make cities safer and more inclusive of women?

WAY AHEAD:

1. BETTER POLICING

2. BETTER ADMINISTRATION

3. CHANGE IN MINDSET

4. REVERSE WOMEN’S ECONOMIC MARGINALISATION

5. CONTROL REGRESSIVE GENDER IMAGERY IN MEDIA

6. WEAKEN STEREOTYPES TAUGHT IN CLASSROOM

7. The modern state needs a more evolved role than simply being an executioner. It should aid citizens in enquiring how society’s failings are spurring crimes, rather than hardening the laws whenever a shocking crime occurs.