Courts should give spl. Reasons for awarding death penalty: SC

Courts should record "special" reasons while awarding death penalty and "must" take into account the crime and the character of the criminal which should reflect "extreme depravity" to deserve such a punishment, the Supreme Court has ruled.
A bench of justices A K Patnaik and Gyan Sudha Misra, which set aside a Rajasthan High Court verdict acquitting two persons in a decade-old gangrape and murder case, found fault with the trial court order sending convicts to the gallows, saying the "special reasons" noted by it do not make it a rarest of rare case.
"...For awarding death sentence, special reasons have to be recorded as provided in Section 354(3), CrPC and while recording such special reasons, the court must pay due regard both to the crime and the criminal," the bench said.

Referring to a constitutional bench verdict, it said "there are materials to show that the crime committed by respondents, both rape and murder of the deceased, were cruel, but there were no materials to establish that the character of the respondents was of extreme depravity so as to make them liable for the punishment of death."
"The trial court has recorded special reasons for imposing the punishment of death on the respondents and these are that the respondents deceived and took away the deceased, turn wise committed rape on her in the darkness of night and thereafter committed her murder by throttling her by her chunni (scarf) and hence they were not entitled for any leniency and should be punished with death.

"In our view, the reasons given by the trial court do not make out the case to be a rarest of rare cases in which death sentence could be awarded to the respondents," it said.
Setting aside the high court's acquittal verdict, it awarded rigorous life imprisonment to convicts -- Ram Niwas and Balveer -- for strangulating the victim on the night of November 1, 2003.
The convicts, who had ravished the victim before killing her, got ten years jail term for the offence of gangrape.