Vasanta Sampat Dupare v. Union of India & Ors.
Background
In 2008, the petitioner was convicted of abducting, sexually assaulting and murdering a four-year-old child in Nagpur, and was sentenced to death; the conviction and sentence were successively affirmed by the Bombay High Court, the Supreme Court (2014), and again on review (2017), and mercy petitions to the Governor of Maharashtra and the President of India were both rejected. After all these avenues were exhausted, the petitioner filed this fresh writ petition under Article 32, arguing that his sentencing was never assessed under the comprehensive mitigation-evidence framework (covering psychiatric health, social history, jail conduct, etc.) that the Supreme Court later laid down in Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh (2023), and that new medical and psychological material showed learning disability, brain injury and psychiatric illness that were never placed before the sentencing court.
Decision Breakdown
The Court first held the petition maintainable, reasoning that Article 32 remains available even after conviction, appeal, review and clemency have all concluded, where a subsequent binding judicial development (here, the Manoj mitigation-evidence protocol) was never applied and a demonstrable Article 21 prejudice results, while cautioning that this is an exceptional route, not a routine one, and does not permit reopening of concluded convictions generally. On the facts, since the petitioner's sentence was finalised in 2017, years before Manoj (2023) was decided, he never had the opportunity to place full mitigating material (psychiatric reports, jail conduct, social history) before any court. The Writ Petition was accordingly allowed only on the question of sentence: the death sentence affirmed in 2017 was set aside "for the present," and the matter was remitted for a fresh sentencing hearing to be conducted strictly per the Manoj guidelines, before a bench to be constituted by the Chief Justice of India. The Court expressly clarified that the underlying finding of guilt/conviction was left untouched and not reopened in any way.
Lesson Learnt
A validly obtained death sentence is not automatically insulated from Article 32 scrutiny merely because appeals, review, and mercy petitions have all failed. If a later Supreme Court ruling changes the procedural safeguards required before a sentence of death can be imposed, a convict may still get a fresh sentencing hearing under that new protocol, even though the underlying conviction stands final.