SC wipes out Emergency era blot

Bench negates 1976 case in which 4 judges upheld Indira Gandhis decision to abrogate Right to Life

A majority decision of a five-member Constitution bench upholding the suspension of fundamental rights during the Emergency in the ADM Jabalpur Vs Shivakant Shukla case (1976) was “erroneous,” a bench of Justices Aftab Alam and Asok Kumar Ganguly said in a judgment.|

The observation was made by the court, which in an unprecedented move commuted to life imprisonment the death sentence, earlier upheld by it, of a man who murdered four members of a family.

“There is no doubt that the majority judgment of this court in the ADM Jabalpur case violated the Fundamental Rights of a large number of people in this country,” Justice Ganguly observed.

Justices Alam and Ganguly set aside the court’s own May 5, 2009, judgment in which it had upheld the death sentence of Remdeo Chauhan alias Rajnath Chauhan who murdered Bhabani Charan Das and three members of his family on March 8, 1992. “The instances of this court’s judgment violating the human rights of the citizens may be extremely rare but it cannot be said that such a situation can never happen.

“We can remind ourselves of the majority decision of the Constitution Bench of this court in the Additional District Magistrate Jabalpur Vs Shivakant Shukla case reported in (1976) which became infamous as the habeus corpus case after four judges of the Supreme Court went with the then Congress government view that even right to life stood abrogated during Emergency.

But at that time Justice Hans Raj Khanna dissented with his colleagues, claiming that the Constitution did not permit right to life and liberty to be subject to executive decree. He was superseded for the post of chief justice of India by Indira Gandhi on January 3, 1977, after which he resigned.

  The Bench of Justices Alam and Ganguly, giving a verdict on the second review petition filed by the convict, also set aside the court’s earlier judgment that the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) had no power to recommend to the governor the commuting of the sentence to life imprisonment after the death penalty had already been upheld by it.

Chauhan was awarded death sentence by a sessions court in Guwhati for the murder of the four persons after holding that the incident fell under the “rarest of rare” category.
The Guwhati High Court upheld the sentence. Later, a two-judge Bench of Justices K T Thomas and R P Sethi of the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence had on July 31, 2000.

Pleas rejected

All the three courts rejected Chauhan’s plea that he cannot be awarded the death penalty as he was only 16 years old at the time of committing the crime.

The courts rejected the plea after extensively examining the medical evidence which indicated that Chauhan was over 20 years of age and hence not entitled to immunity from death penalty available to a juvenile under the Juvenile Justice Act of 2000.

A three-judge Bench of Justices K T Thomas, R P Sethi and S N Phukan, hearing the review petition, on May 10, 2001, by a majority decision dismissed his appeal, though one of the judges took the view that he could be awarded a life term since there was an element of doubt about his juvenile status.

Intervention

However, following an article published in a journal, the NHRC intervened in the matter and asked the Assam governor to examine Chauhan’s case in view of a doubt about his juvenile status.

The state government accordingly commuted the death penalty to life imprisonment. The family members of the deceased filed a fresh petition in the apex court.

In a judgment on May 8, 2009, the apex court slammed the NHRC for setting aside a judicial order and said the commission had no such powers to interfere. However, Chauhan filed a second review petition challenging the apex court’s judgment.

Upholding Chauhan’s plea, the apex court said, “If we look at Section 12(j) of the 1993 Act, we find that it confers on NHRC such other functions as it may consider necessary for the promotion of human rights.”