JOIN US'Consider opinion of victims in commuting death penalty'
The Centre on Wednesday urged the Supreme Court to consider if the victims also have a right to be heard when plea for remission or commutation of death penalty was being decided.
Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, appearing for the Centre, submitted before a five-judge Constitution bench presided over by Justice R M Lodha that the question on the rights of the victims also needed to be determined.
“Whether there is a right of victims at any stage while death penalty is taken into consideration for hearing of commuting into life imprisonment or whether the state can, without referring to the victims, decide on remission,” Kumar said.
The Constitution bench was hearing the reference made by another bench on April 25 following the Centre’s challenge to the Tamil Nadu government’s decision to remit the sentences of all seven convicts in the 1991 Rajiv Gandhi assassination case.
The apex court, on February 20, stayed the state government’s decision to release three convicts — Murugan, Santhan and Arivu — whose death sentence was commuted to life term by it on February 18 in the case.
It later also stayed release of four other convicts — Nalini, Robert Pious, Jayakumar and Ravichandran — in the case, saying there were procedural lapses on the part of the state government.
As the hearing resumed, the SG pointed out that there were seven questions referred to the Constitution bench, which would take a long time for hearing. The bench, also comprising justices J S Khehar, J Chelameswar, A K Sikri and Rohinton Nariman, wanted to fix two weeks’ time frame for deciding the issue.
On July 9, the court had restrained all states from exercising power of remission for releasing convicts from jail who are serving life sentence and sought their response whether the Centre’s nod was needed for the purpose in cases prosecuted by central agencies like CBI.