New Delhi: The noose or a lethal jab? Should death row convicts be given an opportunity to choose the mode of execution. The Supreme Court, while hearing a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) on this, observed the government is not ready to evolve with changing times.
The matter will be heard again on November 11 when the government will make its views clear on the matter.
“At least give an option to the condemned prisoner… whether they want hanging or lethal injection… lethal injection is quick, humane, and decent, as opposed to hanging, which is cruel, barbaric, and lingering,” advocate Rishi Malhotra, appearing for the petitioner, submitted.
Even when pointed out that such an option is given in the military, the Centre, in its counter-affidavit said that it is not feasible.
This was when the bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta made an oral observation that the government is ‘not ready to evolve with changes taking place over a period of time’.
“The problem is that the government is not ready to evolve … it is a very old procedure (referring to death by hanging) things have changed over a period of time,” the bench observed.
Senior advocate Sonia Mathur, appearing for the government, highlighted its averment in a counter affidavit, stating that offering prisoners’ a choice involves policy decisions.
According to the petitioner, the present practice of hanging involves ‘prolonged pain and suffering’. It was argued that a convict should be given a choice to choose between hanging and lethal injection or even a firing squad, electrocution or gas chamber in which death is instantaneous.
Death by hanging can take up to 40 minutes, it was said by the petitioner who pointed out that 49 of 50 states in the US use lethal injections.
The petitioner also asked for the ‘right to die by a dignified procedure of death to be considered a fundamental right, as guaranteed under Article 21.
Death by hanging was also slammed as ‘barbaric, inhuman, and cruel, (and) also against resolutions adopted by the United Nations’, which categorically said that is capital punishment had to be enforced, ‘it shall be carried out so as to inflict minimum possible suffering’.
At the end of 2024, India has a staggering number of 564 death row convicts. The last to be hanged were the four Nirbhaya case convicts. They were hanged in Tihar Jail in 2020.
