The holiest of the holy and the rarest of rare

India does not award the capital punishment except for the "rarest of rare" cases. Once you throw "liberals" into the mix, things tend to get rather complicated but since independence, we have hanged about 4,300 people, at the outside. The last one was hanged in 1995.

By any standards, we are hanging too few people for a country of this size. China executes thousands each year, they also have a rather efficient way of doing it.

No one is quite sure what exactly "rarest of rare" means any more. Violent crimes are on the rise at an alarming rate. We certainly can not structure it around frequency, even terrorism is not all that rare in India.

Clearly, putting a cap on the number of people executed per year can not be the stated goal of a legal system. Yet, no objective sentencing guidelines are forthcoming. Statistically speaking, too few hangings make each one them more likely to be unjust. Justice also means if Dude X got it for a certain crime, Dude Y must also get it for the same crime. Yet we are supposed to believe there was just one dude in India to rape and murder a minor since 1995!

So, from any objective POV, either we start hanging a lot more people, or we get rid of the death penalty altogether.

Yet, a Supreme Court bench stated that we must make the death penalty even rarer. This is a very disappointing stand. Coming on the heels of a recent case where the death penalty was waived, this also appears to be immensely suspicious.

We can clearly see where this is headed. Recently our Law Minister Shri Moily and Home Minister Shri Chidu introduced a peculiar spin to the Afzal hanging story. Apparently the death penalty is like a queue. If the mercy petition of one is pending, the next one in line can not be hanged. This is obviously absurd. A fair justice system gurantees a fair trial and objective sentencing - not an execution strictly according to order.

It should be obvious by now that we have an "activist" judiciary on our hands which wants to add another layer of social justice on top of the legislative and executive. The death penalty system is being redesigned to ensure only certain people hang or rather certain people never hang.