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Right now we will examine some of the fallacies in the counter affidavit filed by the State. This will help us judge the reasonableness or otherwise, the arbitrariness or otherwise, and the processual fairness or otherwise of the prescription of the de facto solitary confinement, especially where the Court has not awarded such a sentence and the Jail Superintendent has read it into S. 30(2).

A prefatory clarification will melt the mist of obscurity in the approach of the State. Many a murderer is a good man before and after the crime and commits it for the first and last time under circumstantial crises which rarely repeat. Some murderers are even noble souls, patriotic rebels, or self-less sacrificers for larger, some times misguided, causes. Not an unusual phenomenon is the spectacle of persons in the death row being political or social dissenters, sensitive revolutionaries, national heroes, coloured people socio-economic pariahs or victims of fabricated evidence. Brutus and Bhagat Singh plus some proletarians, blockheads and blackguards! And this powerful realisation has driven many countries to abolish death penalty and our own to narrow the area of this extreme infliction by judicial compassion and executive clemency. Against this contemporary current of penological humanity, it is presumptuous to impose upon this court, without convincing back-up research, the preposterous proposition that death sentences, often reflective in their terminal chapter and 'sickled over by the pale cast of thought, are homicidal or suicidal beasts and must therefore be kept in solitary confinement. (1) "... the evidence given to us in the countries we visited and the information we received from others, were M uniformly to the effect that murderers are no more likely (1) Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, 1949-1953 Report pp. 216-217.