Collective Conscience

As the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder convicts keep exhausting their legal remedies, they also move closer to the gallows. When the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty of these convicts in 2017, it invoked the doctrine of “collective conscience.” In its judgment (Mukesh and Anr v State for NCT of Delhi and Ors), the Court said:

When the crime is brutal, shocking the collective conscience of the community, sympathy in any form would be misplaced and it would shake the confidence of the public in the administration of criminal justice system.