The Rarest Interpretation

Two sentences by lower courts in different states showed India’s curious relationship with capital punishment. In Kerala, a court gave the death sentence to a young woman who had poisoned her lover because she was planning to marry elsewhere. Mean­while, in West Bengal, the accused of the rape and murder of a doctor in RG Kar hospital in Kolkata, a case that roiled the nation, was given a life sentence. The judge held that he had refused to be swayed by public anger and gone by what the law said. The judge was right because the Su­preme Court has clearly held that death was only reserved for the rarest of the rare crimes. It is not enough that the crime be vicious and shocking. All murders and rapes are an affront to society, and some even have the power to make the entire country seethe with rage but that can only at the most be one element that makes it the “rarest of rare”. It is not a sufficient condition.

The Kerala case that got the death sentence has nothing to dif­ferentiate it from any pre-meditated mur­der. To hold that it is deserving of the death sentence means that all murderers must hang. The RG Kar case is different because it touched a nerve of society, and led to public protests and strikes by doctors. The crime was brutal and reminded women how unsafe even their place of work could be for them. And yet the judge observed, “In the realm of modern justice, we must rise above the primitive instinct of ‘an eye for an eye’ or ‘tooth for a tooth’ or ‘nail for a nail’ or ‘a life for a life’.”

The CBI and the state government are now appealing, asking for the death sentence and that is to appease the public’s yearning for retribution. If the purpose of law is justice, then to equate it with revenge is to turn the clock back into an earlier age when reformation of the criminal had no place in the eyes of the law.

death sentenceKaralaKolkata rape-murder caseRG Kar Medical CollegeWest Bengal