30 March 2012 :

death penalty cannot be imposed on all heinous offences routinely but only in exceptional cases, the Indian Supreme Court has ruled, commuting to life sentence the capital punishment given to four men for gangraping a woman, who died, albeit accidentally during the rape. "Most of the heinous crimes under the IPC are punishable by death penalty or life imprisonment. That by itself does not suggest that in all such offences, penalty of death alone should be awarded. We must notice, even at the cost of repetition, that in such cases awarding life imprisonment would be a rule, while ‘death’ would be the exception. The term ‘rarest of rare’ case which is the consistent determinative rule declared by this court, itself suggests that it has to be an exceptional case. Every case has to be decided on its own merits," a bench of justices A K Patnaik and Swatanter Kumar said. The apex court passed the judgement while sentencing 21 years in jail to the four convicts- Ranjeet, Vishwanath, Amar Singh and Ramnaresh for gang raping a woman on August 9, 2006 on a "Raksha Bandhan" day in Chhattisgarh's Bilaspur district. The apex court also stipulated that the convicts will not be released before actually serving 21-year jail term. The woman was sleeping with her two infants when the incident took place. The apex court said though the crime was heinous, the fact that the convicts were young, had no previous criminal history and the death of the victim occurred accidentally after the rapists gagged her mouth, were mitigating factors for not upholding the death penalty. The sessions court had earlier awarded death penalty and the high court affirmed it.