Death Penalty: When Trial Courts Ignore the Manoj Safeguards

The Lift Line

Judicial independence cannot and does not mean judicial freedom from the law.

Why This Editorial Matters for Your Exam

Capital punishment is a staple of GS2 (judiciary, fundamental rights) and GS4 (ethics of punishment, retribution versus reform), and a frequent Essay theme. Most answers stop at “rarest of rare”. This column gives you the procedural law that now defines the doctrine, three named judgments, and hard compliance data, which together let you argue from evidence rather than opinion.

GS Paper 2: Structure, organisation and functioning of the Judiciary; fundamental rights. GS Paper 4: Ethics in public institutions; accountability; justice and fairness.

Background and Context

The trigger. An Additional District and Sessions Judge in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, sentenced 23 people to death over about five months, in nine judgments. The author, who read all nine, finds that they cite substantially the same Supreme Court precedents in the same order, often with the same excerpts, but decide the sentence overwhelmingly on the nature of the crime, with no Manoj-compliant exercise at all.

The law the judgments set aside:

The systemic data. The author’s centre, The Square Circle Clinic at NALSAR University of Law, analysed 216 cases in which trial courts imposed death sentences between 2023 and 2025. Only 8 (less than 4 per cent) complied with the Supreme Court’s requirements.

The Analysis

1. The doctrine is procedural, not rhetorical. Bachan Singh did not merely say death should be rare. It required the court to assess the individual and to show why reform is impossible. A judgment that recites the precedent and then reasons only from the crime satisfies the form and defeats the substance.

2. Manoj made mitigation investigable. Before 2022, mitigation was often reduced to the judge asking the convict whether there was anything to add. Manoj recognised that this cannot be meaningful: a convicted person, frequently poor and poorly represented, cannot produce evidence of their own history. The court must therefore call for material from institutions and experts. The author stresses that this “was not an optional checklist”.

3. Dupare raised the stakes. By holding that a death sentence imposed without these safeguards violates fundamental rights, the 2025 judgment converted a best-practice direction into a constitutional requirement. A non-compliant sentence is not merely open to criticism; it is unlawful.

4. Four per cent compliance is a system failure, not a rogue judge. One sessions court imposing 23 sentences is striking, but the 216-case analysis shows the problem is general. Trial judges cannot select the precedents they find persuasive and ignore requirements they find inconvenient.

5. The appellate safety net has a cost. The author expects these sentences to be set aside eventually, since a High Court or the Supreme Court will apply Manoj. But appeals take years, and throughout that period the accused lives under the “spectre” of a death sentence the law did not permit.

The precision that earns marks. Write “the Supreme Court restricted the death penalty to the rarest of rare cases in Bachan Singh (1980), a five-judge bench”, not “the Supreme Court abolished” or “the Constitution restricts”. The death penalty remains constitutional; what the Court regulates is the procedure and the standard.

Data and Institutions Vault

Prelims-grade facts:

The judgments:

• Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab (1980): five-judge bench; upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty; laid down the rarest of rare standard.
• Machhi Singh v. State of Punjab (1983): set out categories of cases to guide the application of the rarest of rare standard.
• Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh (May 2022): mitigation material mandatory, including probation officer and prison reports and a psychological evaluation.
• Vasanta Sampat Dupare v. Union of India (August 2025): death without the Manoj safeguards violates fundamental rights.

The constitutional and statutory frame:

• Article 21: no deprivation of life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.
• Article 72: the President may grant pardons and commute sentences, including a sentence of death.
• Article 161: the Governor may grant pardons and commute sentences for offences against laws on State subjects.
• Article 72(1)(c): the President may pardon in every case where the sentence is death.
• A death sentence passed by a Court of Session must be confirmed by the High Court before it can be executed.
• The Law Commission’s 262nd Report (2015) recommended abolishing the death penalty for all crimes except terrorism-related offences and waging war.

The numbers in this column:

• 23 death sentences, nine judgments, about five months, one ADJ in Muzaffarnagar.
• 216 cases in which trial courts imposed death sentences, 2023 to 2025, analysed; 8 compliant (less than 4 per cent).

Prelims, the traps:

• Article 72(1)(c) gives the President power in all death-sentence cases, whichever law the offence falls under.
• Bachan Singh upheld the death penalty; it did not abolish it.

⚠️ Watch the trap: “Rarest of rare” is often written as a description of the crime. It is a test about the sentence: whether the alternative of life imprisonment is unquestionably foreclosed, which requires evidence about the offender.

The Debate

For retaining the death penalty with its present safeguards. Some crimes are so grave that society’s sense of justice demands the ultimate penalty; the Supreme Court has upheld it in exceptional cases; and the appellate structure, with mandatory High Court confirmation and presidential clemency, provides multiple checks against error.

Against the present practice. The checks work slowly and unevenly. When compliance at the trial stage is under 4 per cent, the system relies on appellate courts to correct nearly every sentence, which means years of unlawful exposure to death. Retribution-driven sentencing also falls hardest on the poor, who cannot assemble mitigation material without institutional help, which is exactly why Manoj put that burden on the court.

The balanced verdict. Whatever one’s view on abolition, a punishment that is retained must be administered lawfully. The immediate reform is not doctrinal but institutional: trained mitigation investigators, access to psychological assessment at the district level, and High Court oversight of sentencing practice, so that compliance does not depend on the individual judge.

How to Think About This

Distinguish the rule from its implementation. Many governance failures are not failures of law but of compliance: the rule is clear, binding and repeatedly affirmed, and is still ignored at the point of delivery. When a question asks why an outcome persists despite a clear rule, look for the gap between the court or ministry that makes the rule and the officer who applies it: incentives, capacity, pressure and the expectation that someone else will fix it later. The same frame explains custodial deaths despite D.K. Basu, and manual scavenging despite the 2013 Act.

Diagram-in-Words

Takeaway Box

• Bachan Singh (1980), Manoj (2022), Dupare (2025): the standard, the procedure, and the constitutional consequence of ignoring the procedure.
• Manoj’s mitigation material: probation officer report, prison conduct report, psychological and psychiatric assessment, defence mitigation report.
• 8 of 216 trial-court death-sentence cases (2023 to 2025) complied: less than 4 per cent.
• 23 death sentences in about five months from one Muzaffarnagar court, in nine judgments that cite much the same precedents in much the same order.
• Ethics line: the courage the law asks of a judge is the courage to follow procedure when public anger demands otherwise.

Sources: The Indian Express

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