Machhi Singh and the Five Categories

In one line

Machhi Singh turned the rarest of rare test into a checklist of five categories, which is why trial courts can apply it and why later Benches have said it went wrong.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: in Machhi Singh v. State of Punjab, (1983) 3 SCC 470, the Supreme Court identified five heads under which the community's collective conscience may be so shocked that it will expect the holders of judicial power to inflict the death penalty: the manner of commission of the murder, the motive for it, the anti-social or socially abhorrent nature of the crime, the magnitude of the crime, and the personality of the victim. It also culled four propositions from Bachan Singh and set two questions a court must ask before passing a death sentence.

Facts

A feud between two families led to seventeen deaths in a series of five incidents in five neighbouring villages in Punjab on the night between 12 and 13 August 1977. The dead and injured included men, women and children related to one Amar Singh and his sister Piaro Bai. Machhi Singh and eleven companions were prosecuted in five sessions cases, one for each village, Machhi Singh being the common accused at each trial. Four were sentenced to death and nine to imprisonment for life, and the High Court confirmed. The appeals raised the application of the rarest of rare rule.

The reasoning behind the categories

The Court asked why the community does not endorse a doctrine of death in no case, and answered it in a passage worth knowing.

The humanistic edifice is built on reverence for life. When a member of the community violates that principle by killing another, the community may not feel bound by it. Every member is able to live in safety because of the protective arm of the community and the rule of law, and owes a debt to the community for that protection. When ingratitude is shown instead of gratitude by killing a member of the community which protects the murderer himself from being killed, or when the community feels that for the sake of self preservation the killer has to be killed, the community may withdraw the protection by sanctioning the death penalty. But the community will not do so in every case. It may do so, in the rarest of rare cases, when its collective conscience is so shocked that it will expect the holders of judicial power to inflict the death penalty irrespective of their personal opinion about the desirability of retaining it.

Note the phrase collective conscience. It is Machhi Singh's addition to the vocabulary and it is not in Bachan Singh. Much of the later criticism is about what it lets a court do.