Trial Court's 23 Death Sentences Raise Sentencing Compliance Concerns

India's death penalty jurisprudence rests on Article 21, which guarantees that no person shall be deprived of life except by procedure established by law. In Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab (1980), a five-judge Constitution Bench upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty but confined its use to the 'rarest of rare' cases. The Court held that a judge must weigh both the crime and the criminal, and cannot impose death merely because the offence appears brutal or shocking. Under Article 141, this interpretation binds every court in India, leaving trial judges no discretion to substitute their own sentencing philosophy for the Supreme Court's standard.

Over time, the gap between this stated standard and actual trial court practice widened. In Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh (2022), the Supreme Court held that asking an accused, at sentencing, whether they wish to say anything is not meaningful consideration of mitigating circumstances. It required concrete material instead: a probation officer's report, psychological and psychiatric assessment, prison conduct records, and a mitigation report from the defence. This effectively created a detailed procedural code for capital sentencing that the Code of Criminal Procedure, and now the BNSS, 2023, do not themselves spell out. Such judge-made procedural mandates are similar in nature to other instances where courts have filled legislative silence to protect fundamental rights, raising a recurring separation-of-powers question about how far judicial guideline-making can go before it resembles legislation.

The Supreme Court went a step further in Vasanta Sampat Dupare v. Union of India (2025), holding that sentencing an accused to death without following the Manoj safeguards itself violates fundamental rights. This converted procedural compliance from a best practice into a constitutional requirement.