DEATH PENALTY IN INDIA: CONSTITUTIONAL VALIDITY VERSUS SENTENCING ARBITRARINESS

Capital sentence is a quite contested matter, which affects constitutional rights, human rights, and criminal laws, altogether. India is a retentionist country, as it still has retained the colonial punishment of the death penalty. Due to a lack of legislative support, the judiciary itself has created judicial limitation, with the means of the ‘rarest of the rare doctrine,’ which was articulated as a result of slow judicial progress and blending of human rights jurisprudence into the penological theory. Whereas the indiscriminate and unequal application of the doctrine has raised concerns about its legitimacy and validity. This paper scrutinizes the socio- legal implications of the same statutory framework, and the constitutional rights conflicting with the punishment. While also tracing the origin of the doctrine through judicial pronouncement and the slow amalgamation of human rights in the criminal sentence. The paper adopts doctrinal legal research to delve deeper into the issues, while also proposing pragmatic reforms to ease the conflict of interest and hasten abolition.