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Supreme Court limits the death penalty to no-reform cases

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The death penalty can be imposed only where the possibility of a convict’s reformation is completely ruled out, the Supreme Court has held, Hindustan Times reported on 5 October 2026.

A bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta and Vijay Bishnoi said the prosecution must show that life imprisonment is unquestionably inadequate, and that death is reserved for cases where life imprisonment is demonstrably foreclosed. The possibility of reform cannot be presumed absent merely because a crime is exceptionally brutal or grotesque. The court said death is justified only when life imprisonment is “unquestionably foreclosed”.

Death penalty commuted to imprisonment for natural life

Applying that rule, the bench commuted the death sentence of a man convicted of repeatedly sexually assaulting his six-year-old stepdaughter and murdering her in April 2018. He is to remain in prison for the rest of his natural life, without remission. The court said the state had not excluded the possibility of reformation, and that natural-life imprisonment was adequate for a crime of that gravity. “The State has not excluded the possibility of the appellant’s reformation,” the bench held.

The judgment said sentencing must weigh the offender as well as the crime. Mitigating material included his account of childhood deprivation and adult misfortune, no previous convictions, satisfactory conduct in custody, continuing family ties, his age of about 56, and nearly eight years in prison, including about seven under a death sentence. A psychological evaluation did not show a condition from which incorrigibility could be inferred. The state produced no evidence that reform was ruled out. The court called the killing “instrumental silencing” and an aggravating circumstance of the highest order, but said even that did not by itself prove he was beyond redemption. His mother was the prosecution’s only eyewitness to events inside the home.

Source: Hindustan Times

Photo: Legaleagle86 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (resized)

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