Judgment

CHINNAPPA REDDY, J.:- A prisoner condemned to death over eight years ago claims that it is not lawful to hang him now. Let us put the worst against him first. He was the principal accused in the case and, so to say, the arch-villain of a Villainous piece. He was the brain behind a cruel conspiracy to impersonate Customs Officers, pretend to question unsuspecting visitors to the city of Madras, abduct them on the pretext of interrogating them, administer sleeping pills to the unsuspecting victims, steal their cash and jewels and finally murder them. The plan was ingeniously fiendish and the appellant was the architect. There is no question that the learned Sessions Judge very rightly sentenced him to death. But that was in January 1975. Since then he has been kept in solitary confinement, quite contrary to our ruling in Sunil Batra v. Delhi Administration, (1979) 1 SCR 392: Before that he was a prisoner under remand for two years. So, the prisoner claims that to take away his life after keeping him in jail for ten years, eight of which in illegal solitary confinement, is a gross violation of the fundamental right guaranteed by Article 21 of the Constitution. Let us examine h