11 November 1999 :

On November 11, former Director-General of Police V. R. Lakshminarayanan, Tamil Nadu and K. G. Kannabiran, National President of the PUCL, said the death penalty has neither acted as a deterrent in reducing murders in the country, nor was it consonant with the outlook of a civilized society. Addressing a press conference here, under the auspices of the "Campaign Against the Death Penalty," a nationwide movement whose chairperson is Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer, they made a strong plea to amend Section 302 of the IPC to delete the word "death" and to exclude provisions that sanction the death penalty in other statutes. Deploring the "retributive theory of punishment" that was presupposed by the death penalty, the former Director-General of Police quoted Mahatma Gandhi who had said that "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." This form of punishment neither helped to reform nor rehabilitate the criminal, he said. Calling for renewing this debate to "stop this trend" of death sentences becoming more frequent, Mr Kannabiran said that deterrence and retribution were both "undemocratic." Underscoring that the conviction against the accused remained even when the sentence was modified, he further said that in the long-term, social and political imbalances will have to be corrected by other means, "rather than by a repressive legal structure."