In a historic move on 4.12.2017, the Madhya Pradesh State Assembly unanimously passed a bill awarding death penalty to rapists of girls below 12 years. The Dand Vidhi (Madhya Pradesh Sanshodhan) Vidheyak, 2017 provides for death or a minimum term of 14 years’ rigorous imprisonment or life imprisonment till death for raping girls aged 12 or less and also makes repeated stalking a non-bailable offence. Chief Minister Shiv Raj Singh Chauhan, after passing the bill, said, “The people who rape 12-year-old girls are not humans but devils. They don’t have the right to live”. The bill will be sent to the Centre and will need the assent of the President for becoming a law.
Source: Indian Express
Merely providing for death penalty in the statute book is not going to deter these potential “devils” from committing such a dastardly and diabolic crime. As long as the death sentence awarded to such convicts is NOT actually carried out, it serves no purpose. The long winded, tortuous, dilatory process of criminal justice administration, the executive clemency, the endless review petitions, and misplaced sympathy for the offender leading to undue leniency shown by the courts are all going to ensure that the convict is not executed and the sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. The last person actually executed for rape and murder of a teen-aged girl was Dhananjoy Chatterjee in 2004.
Since then number of convicts for rape and murder have been sentenced to death but none of them has been executed so far in the last fourteen years. The legislative measure by the MP Assembly is laudable; however, its actual implementation remains a moot question.
Merely providing for death penalty in the statute book is not going to deter these potential “devils” from committing such a dastardly and diabolic crime. As long as the death sentence awarded to such convicts is NOT actually carried out , it serves no purpose. The long winded, tortuous, dilatory process of criminal justice administration, the executive clemency, the endless review petitions, and misplaced sympathy for the offender leading to undue leniency shown by the courts are all going to ensure that the convict is not executed and the sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. The last person actually executed for rape and murder of a teen-aged girl was Dhananjoy Chatterjee in 2004.
Since then number of convicts for rape and murder have been sentenced to death but none of them has been executed so far in the last fourteen years. The legislative measure by the MP Assembly is laudable, however its actual implementation remains a moot question.