VERY IMPORTANT POINT
The system of hanging is as paintess as is possible in the circumstances; it causes no greater pain than an other known method of execution of death sentence and it involves no barharity torture or degradation. The system fulfils he mandate of Article 21 of the Constitution that execution of a sentence should not constitute a punishment by itself Thus Section 354(5) of Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 is constitutionally valid.

Judgment

CHANDRACHUD, CJI. (for himself and on behalf of R. S. Pathak, J.) :- In this batch of Writ Petitions, the petitioners were sentenced to death for the offence of murder under Section 302 of the Penal Code. They have nothing in common except that they committed murders and have been sentenced to death. The sentence of death imposed upon them has become final in the sense that the Special Leave Petitions, Appeals Review Petitions and Mercy Petitions filed by them have been dismissed, some of these more than once. The main question which has been raised by the petitioners in these writ petitions relates to the validity of the mode of execution of the death sentence.

2. Section 354 (5) of the Code of Criminal Procedure provides that :

When any person is sentenced to death, the sentence shall direct that he be hanged by the neck till he is dead.

The petitioners challenge the constitutional validity of this provision on the ground that hanging a convict by rope is a cruel and barbarous method of executing a death sentence, which is violative of Article 21 of the Constitution. That article provides that.

No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.

3. The validity of death sentence which Section 302 prescribes for the offence of murder was upheld by this Court in Bachan Singh (1983) 1 SCR 145. The ratio of that decision is that the normal sentence for murder is life imprisonment and that the sentence of death can be imposed in a very exceptional class of cases, described in that judgment as the rarest of rare cases. Which kind of cases would precisely fall within that category is in the very nature of things difficult to define and even to describe. But, all the same, a studied attempt was made by this Court in Machhi Singh (1983) 3 SCC 470 to identify, though not to crystallize, the area of those rarest of rare cases in which death sentence can justifiably be imposed. Shri Gargs criticism of that judgment that it virtually overrules Bachan Singh and Jagmohan Singh (1973) 2 SCR 541 is wide off the mark. In Machhi Singh, the learned Judges have but formulated broad guidelines to assist the Courts in deciding the vexed question as to whether the death sentence is at an called for. Evidently, the judgment does not enlarge the scope of the rule in Bachan Singh by broadening the narrow held of cases which call for the death sentence.

4. But, Machhi Singh is by the way. The validity of the death sentence for the offence of murder having been upheld by this Court after a careful and prolonged discussion, there is no justification for reopening that question, though such a suggestion was made half-heartedly before us, towards the conclusion of the arguments. The question that, in the circumstances mentioned in Bachan Singh, it is permissible to impose the sentence of death must be treated as concluded and not any longer open to argument. There has to be finality to litigation, criminal as much as civil, if law is not to lose its credibility. No one of course can question that law is a dynamic science, the social utility of which consists in its ability to keep abreast of the emerging trends in social and scientific advance and its willingness to readjust its postulates in order to accommodate those trends. Life is not static. The purpose of law is to serve the needs of life. Therefore law cannot be static. But, that is not to say that judgments rendered by this Court after a full debate should be reconsidered every now and then and their authority doubted or diluted. That would be doing disservice to law since certainty over a reasonably foreseeable period is the hall-mark of law.

5. The learned Solicitor General has raised a preliminary objection to these Writ Petitions on the ground that the question which is sought to be argued by the petitioners is concluded by the judgment rendered by a Constitution Bench of this Court in Bachan Singh (AIR 1980 SC 898 and AIR 1982 SC 1325)