The ‘rarest of rare’ doctrine?

• Two murder convictions in India resulted in contrasting verdicts, highlighting the application of the death penalty.

• Sanjay Roy, a civic volunteer, was convicted of a raped and murdered doctor in August 2024, but sentenced to life imprisonment.

• Sharon Raj, a 23-year-old student from Kerala, was poisoned and died from multiple organ failures in October 2022. The death penalty was imposed and classified as one of the “rarest of rare” cases.

• The doctrine’s origins date back to 1972 when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty in Jagmohan Singh versus State of U.P. The petitioner argued that the death sentence violates Article 19 and that judges lack clear guidelines for deciding between the death penalty and life imprisonment.

• In 1980, the Supreme Court established the ‘rarest of rare’ doctrine, but did not elaborate on what the ‘rarest of rare’ meant.

• In 1983, the Supreme Court struck down Section 303 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which prescribed the mandatory death penalty for anyone who commits murder while serving a life sentence.

• In September 2022, the Supreme Court referred to a Constitution Bench on how to provide a “meaningful, real and effective” hearing on mitigating circumstances in cases that attract the death penalty.