"Supreme Court upholds hanging as constitutionally valid mode of execution"
Article 21
Fundamental right guaranteeing protection of life and personal liberty; judicially expanded to include dignitary rights.
Stare decisis
Doctrine requiring courts to follow precedents set by higher or co-equal benches.
India's constitutional framework guarantees the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21, which the Supreme Court has progressively interpreted to include a cluster of dignitary rights — the right to live with dignity, the right to health, and, as affirmed in Gian Kaur v. State of Punjab (1996), the right to die with dignity. This expansive reading of Article 21 has formed the bedrock of challenges to the manner in which the State exercises its ultimate coercive power: the death penalty.
Capital punishment itself has survived constitutional scrutiny in India. In Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab (1980), a five-judge Constitution Bench upheld the death penalty as constitutional, confining its application to the 'rarest of rare' cases. The mode of execution, however, has been a separate and less-litigated question. Section 393(5) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023 — carrying forward a provision virtually unchanged since its introduction in the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), 1861 — mandates that a death sentence be carried out by hanging the condemned person by the neck until dead. This provision has survived every constitutional challenge mounted against it, most notably in Deena v. Union of India (1983).
The constitutional validity of hanging as a mode of execution was definitively examined in Deena v. Union of India (1983), where a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court assessed medical evidence, expert opinion, and comparative execution methods from other jurisdictions. The Court held that hanging, when properly administered through the long-drop method — where the drop distance is calculated based on the condemned person's height and weight to cause a fracture-dislocation at the C2-C3 vertebrae — brings about near-instant unconsciousness and death. The Court concluded that this method does not inflict greater pain than other known methods and avoids 'barbarity, torture, and degradation,' thereby satisfying the Article 21 standard.
The Law Commission of India's 187th Report (2003), chaired by Justice M. …
In India, Judicial Review implies
Which one of the following statements is correct?
A Writ of Prohibition is an order issued by the Supreme Court or High Courts to:
Consider the following statements regarding the constitutional validity of hanging as a mode of execution in India:
1.The Supreme Court in Deena v. Union of India (1983) upheld hanging after examining medical evidence and held it does not violate Article 21.
2.The Law Commission's 187th Report recommended shooting as an alternative to hanging.
3.Section 393(5) of the BNSS, 2023 retains hanging as the prescribed mode of execution.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
With reference to Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, which of the following propositions has the Supreme Court affirmed in its jurisprudence?
1.Article 21 includes the right to die with dignity.
2.Constitutional protection under Article 21 ceases to apply once a person is sentenced to death.
3.The right to life under Article 21 encompasses the right to a dignified procedure of execution.
Select the correct answer using the codes below:
Assertion (A): The Supreme Court's recent ruling upholding hanging does not permanently foreclose future constitutional challenges to the method of execution.
Reason (R): The Court held that constitutional law evolves, and fundamentally new scientific or medical evidence could alter the assumptions on which the 1983 Deena judgment was decided.
Which one of the following is correct?
Which of the following correctly describes the legal status of Law Commission of India reports in the Indian constitutional framework?
The doctrine of 'rarest of rare' in the context of capital punishment in India was established in which of the following cases?
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