How the Supreme Court shaped due process in death penalty cases

The Day Against the Death Penalty, observed on October 10, offered a fitting moment to look back on how the Supreme Court’s 1980 safeguards, laid down when it upheld capital punishment, have fared over the past four decades. In Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab (1980), the Constitution Bench upheld the death penalty, but imposed specific conditions in the shape of guidelines for the exercise of judicial discretion.

Following the legislative scheme of Section 354(3) of the CrPC, now Section 393(3) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023, life imprisonment was to be the norm, and death sentence could be imposed only for “special reasons”. Courts were to weigh the circumstances of the crime alongside those of the accused, and impose death only where life imprisonment was “unquestionably foreclosed”.