Rarest of rare crimes

The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to stop the hanging of 1993 Mumbai blasts convict Yakub Memon and said he shall hang to death at 7 am on Thursday unless the President accedes to his fresh plea for mercy. As an established rule, death penalty can only be awarded in the “rarest of the rare” cases.

But there is no statutory definition of what rarest of rare means, the debate on each death sentence punishment rages on. According to Firstpost.Com, a provision was introduced in 1973, Section 354(3) of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), which stipulated that a judgment shall state ''the reasons for the sentence awarded and, in the case of sentence of death, the special reasons for such sentence''.

It was while interpreting those ''special reasons'' required for invoking the discretion of death penalty that the Supreme Court formulated the ''rarest of rare'' doctrine in 1980 in the Bachan Singh case. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled on what exactly constituted a rarest of rare case.

Capital punishment could be awarded when a “murder is committed in an extremely brutal, grotesque, diabolical, revolting or dastardly manner so as to arouse intense and extreme indignation of the community,” the court said, according to a report in theTelegraph.

If the motive betrays depravity and meanness, or if a backward or minority community member is killed not for personal reasons but to arouse social wrath, the accused should get death, it added. Other crimes which technically fall into the rarest of rare cases are bride burnings and dowry deaths, a child victim, the assassination of a public figure for political reasons, or killing a defenseless person because of old age or infirmity.

"'The question of death penalty is not free from the subjective element and the confirmation of death sentence or its commutation by this court depends a good deal on the personal predilection of the judges constituting the bench',"said Justice Aftab Alam of the Supreme Court in 2008 in the Swamy Shraddananda case.

According to the court, precedent says that murders of people from vulnerable social groups should be considered for capital punishment. These can include murders where a lower-caste person or member of a religious minority is killed in circumstances that “arouse social wrath,” or some murders of women, such as bride-burning and dowry deaths.

Multiple murders – where many members of a family or group are killed – also merit the death penalty. Some rather broad categories also potentially merit the death penalty. The murder of a wife in order to marry another woman with whom a man is “infatuated” can incur capital punishment, the court had said.