For a country that has come to accept death as a dispensable statistic, the recent pangs over the death penalty are a welcome aberration. So while the black warrant is being questioned to check if it were indeed being issued for the "rarest of rare" offences, fresh doubts are emerging on the inhuman mode of executing the verdict.

Though the ruthlessness of capital punishment has haunted the collective conscience from time to time, the recent twinges surfaced after the Supreme Court verdict against Devender Pal Singh Bhullar in 2002. The Sikh terrorist, accused of carrying out a bomb blast that killed nine and injured former Youth Congress chief M.S. Bitta in 1993, was sentenced to death on a split verdict. While apex court justices B.N. Agarwal and Arijit Passayet concurred on the Special Court ruling granting the death penalty, Justice M.B. Shah on the other hand, acquitted Bhullar. The discrepancy in the judgement, besides several similar rulings, prompted many review petitions arguing that death sentences should only be passed if the judges were unanimous. But the petitions were promptly rejected by the same majority as in the Bhullar case-by the same judges who had sentenced Bhullar to death.

Even as the controversy was skimming the social awareness and ringing through the court corridors, the Law Commission of India (LCI) moved to span another dimension of the issue. It circulated a report in March this year, questioning the justification of execution by hanging or even by a firing squad (as in military court-martials), and mooted switching over to quick, painless and "decent" execution by intravenous injection of lethal chemicals.

For the inmates on death row, the recommendation-if implemented-could mean a much more comfortable rite of passage than what the prison manuals currently offer. Death for the condemned person means a drop of 6 ft from a high crossbeam, the face draped in a hood, the hands tied, the legs bound with a long, thick stretch of Manila hemp fastened to the crossbeam and drawn at the lower end into an elaborate noose around the neck. "He be hanged by the neck till he is dead," reads Section 354(5) of the Criminal Procedure Code-without accounting for the physical pain the convict is forced to endure.

Death by hanging is intended to occur when the neck bones snap-as the trap door under the feet opens up and the convict drops till the end of the rope-leading first to unconsciousness and then strangulation. But most executions by hanging-going by the international precedence-are botched. In reality, the convict is first strangulated, delaying the unconsciousness by a full four minutes, and death is caused by the most excruciating asphyxiation. The procedure is brutal and far from what the Supreme Court ruled in the 1983 Deena Vs Union of India case. The execution, according to the verdict, must pass the following tests:

It should be quick, simple and free from anything that unnecessarily increases the poignancy of the prisoner's apprehension.

There should be immediate unconsciousness leading quickly to death.

It should be decent.

It should not involve mutilation.

While the prisoner's apprehension begins to heighten long before his march to the gallows-when he is weighed to measure the length of the rope-the extent of mutilation after hanging is usually unbearably ghastly. In fact, the real purpose of the hood is to hide this disfigurement.

According to the LCI, execution by lethal injection is definitely a more humane procedure. In a three-stage process, the convict is first injected with sodium thiopental, a barbiturate, that forces him into a deep sleep. This is followed by a shot of pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant that causes paralysis of the lungs. Finally, potassium chloride is injected to stop the heart. While it requires more than 40 minutes to declare a hanged convict dead, it takes no more than four minutes for the injected prisoner to expire and a couple of minutes more to confirm it.

In 2001, all the 66 executions in the US were conducted through lethal injection. Even in China, where execution by a firing squad is a common practice, eight executions in 2000 were carried out by lethal injections. The Royal Commission in the UK, in its report on capital punishment (1949-53), ruled against the lethal injection because it involved intravenous injection to be administered by trained personnel while the British Medical Association refused to allow any licensed doctor to be a part of it. Now, however, trained non-medical personnel administer the drugs, or as in some states in the US, doctors are not prohibited from carrying out executions.

In India, the questionnaire that is now being circulated by the LCI shows a discernible bias towards lethal injections. The other alternative, electrocution, is no less barbaric. It leaves the body disfigured and makes it "smoke", literally, with the preliminary exposure to a 2,000-volt shock. The execution by firing squad is, as the Supreme Court observed, "practised in dictatorships", and may go.

However, there is still an opinion, muted though it is, in favour of hanging. The proponents of this procedure claim it to be the best form of execution precisely because of the pain and agony it inflicts on the individual. "The man convicted of a heinous crime deserves no indulgence," says Ved Prakash Sharma, president of the Delhi Bar Association. But enlightened judicial opinion has discarded such proportionality between crime and punishment. In the Bachan Singh Vs State of Punjab case in 1982, Justice P.N. Bhagwati said in his minority judgement, "This justificatory reason (that the convict 'deserves' to die a painful death) cannot commend itself to any civilised society because it is based on the theory of retribution ... that is not a permissible penological goal."

So even as the hangman's noose as the icon of the death house may well be on its way to being replaced by a line of intravenous supplies, there are other issues open to debate. The Bhullar judgement, for instance, also touches upon the discrepancies in death sentences. In the Indira Gandhi assassination case, Balbir Singh was acquitted while Kehar Singh was executed (along with Satwant Singh), though all were charged for the same offence. This, because the former had a different set of judges deciding his case. Congress MP and senior counsel Kapil Sibal, who fought and lost the case for the petitioners seeking annulment of death sentences, says, "The society cannot be so irrational as to see a man hanged if one of the judges in the highest court opines that he should be acquitted. The majority view in this case was entirely wrong."

The bigger question, however, is the efficacy of capital punishment, be it as society's revenge against the wrongdoer who is thought to "deserve" no mercy, or as a deterrent. While public opinion in India is still in favour of retributive punishment, much of the developed world, including the European Union, has banned the death sentence. It was for this reason that Portugal refused to hand over extortionist Abu Salem to India.

Abolishing the death penalty may seem unlikely in India, but making the execution more humane should no longer be an option. It should be an imperative. The jury is out.