India joins nations which don't execute mentally ill convicts - Times of India
Jun 2, 2019, NEW DELHI: In a landmark judgment catapulting India into a league of nations that don't execute lunatics, the Supreme Court has barred the execution of a person if he develops a mental illness and loses cognitive power during post-conviction imprisonment. Courts across the world, including India, have historically considered mental illness as a mitigating circumstance for imposition of lenient sentences as the offender, because of his mental incapacity, seldom knows the consequences of his action, which becomes a crime. But this is the first time that the SC, through a bench of Justices N V Ramana, M M Shantanagoudar and Indira Banerjee, took note that punishment is a communication from the sentencing system to the criminal about the consequences of his action. When a condemned prisoner loses cognitive power because of postconviction mental illness, the essence of that communication - consequences of the crime - is lost, it said. Writing the judgment for the bench, Justice Ramana said, "The notion of death penalty and the sufferance it brings along causes incapacitation and is idealised to invoke a sense of deterrence. If the accused is not able to understand the impact and purpose of his execution because of his disability, the raison d'etre for the execution itself collapses." "When such a disability occurs, a person may not be in a position to understand the implications of his actions and the consequences it entails. In this situation, the execution of such a person would lower the majesty of law," Justice Ramana said. This judgment came in a petition seeking review of the SC's 2008 ruling in which it had upheld the death penalty awarded by the trial court and Bombay HC to a person, referred to as "X" by the court, for sexually assaulting and murdering two minor girls in December 1999 at Gulumb in Maharashtra. While relieving him of execution, the SC ordered that he should be kept in jail till death as given the serious crime, it would not be safe to send him back to society even though he has spent 20 years in prison, 17 of them on death row. Realising that this ruling could be misused, the SC warned that post-conviction mental illness could not be used as a ruse by condemned prisoners to escape the noose. "This ground needs to be utilised only in extreme cases of mental illness... only extreme cases of convicts being mentally ill are not executed," the bench said. "This court cautions against utilisation of this dicta as a ruse to escape the gallows by pleading such defence even if such ailment is not of grave severity," it said. The Justice Ramana -led bench laid down the test of post-conviction severe mental illness as a ground for non-execution of condemned prisoners. "The test envisaged herein predicates that the offender needs to have a severe mental illness or disability, which simply means that a medical professional would objectively consider the illness to be most serious so that he cannot understand or comprehend the nature and purpose behind the imposition of death penalty. These disorders generally include schizophrenia, other serious psychotic disorders, and dissociative disorders with schizophrenia," the SC said. Justices Ramana, Shantanagoudar and Banerjee discussed in detail judgments from the US and UK Supreme Courts on this issue besides taking note of the related global judicial trends on post-conviction mental illness of condemned prisoners. They said, "It is a well-acknowledged fact throughout the world that prisons are difficult places to be in. The World Health Organisation and the International Red Cross identify that multiple circumstances such as overcrowding, various forms of violence, enforced solitude, lack of privacy, inadequate healthcare facilities, concerns about family etc can take a toll on the mental health of prisoners." The SC said, "Due to prevailing lack of awareness about such issues, the prisoners have no recourse and their mental health keeps on degrading day by day. The prevailing argument in favour of such prisoners is that - whether imposition of death penalty upon such prisoners is justified, who have clearly impaired their abilities to even understand the nature and purpose of such punishment and the reason for such imposition?" --- This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. https://www.avg.com Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/accessindia@accessindia.org.in/ To unsubscribe send a message to accessindia-requ...@accessindia.org.in with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails sent through this mailing list..
