SHIV MOHAN SINGH Vs. STATE DELHI ADMINISTRATION

JUDGEMENT

(1.) If 'survival after death may aptly describe any litigative phenomenon, the present review proceeding may well quality for that quaint claim. The relief of review relates to the death penalty imposed upon the petitioner by the trial Court, confirmed in appeal, and dismissed even at the stage of special leave by this Court. In the ordinary course, judicial finality has thus been affixed on the capital sentence so awarded although Presidential clemency, which has been sought and negatived, may still be open under Article 72 of the Constitution. Mercy, like divinity, is amenable to unending exercise but in this mundane matter it is for the Head of State to act and not for the apex Court.

(2.) Sombre sentencing is the Fifth Act in the tragedy of a murder trial and, for the Judges of the Supreme Court, assumes a grim seriousness and poignant gravity since the petitioner's final appeal for judicial commutation, if rejected, may perhaps prove imminently fatal to his life. Even so, when we chronicle the events connected with the judicial proceedings in this Court it will be realised that our review power has repeatedly been invoked in vain and naturally a further exercise of the same power must be justified by the compelling pressure of fresh circumstances within the limits of the law. The nature of the judicial process, even at the tallest tower, is such that, to use Cardozo's elegant expressions, a judge even when he is free, is still not wholly free; he is not to innovate at pleasure; he is not a knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness; he is to draw inspiration from consecrated principles. Where the judge's values and those prevailing in society clash, the Judge must, in theory, give way to the objective right.

(3.) The focus, therefore, must turn on the existence of grounds of manifest miscarriage of justice unavailable on the earlier occasions. Before that, a brief reference may be made to the criminal facts.