In Brief
Jagdish was sentenced to death for murdering his wife and five children. His mercy petition, filed in October 2009, was rejected in July 2014—a delay of nearly 5 years, with the State of Madhya Pradesh inexplicably taking over 4 years to forward it. The Supreme Court held that such unexplained delay, combined with 14 years of incarceration, violated his constitutional right to due process and rendered the death sentence execution arbitrary. Despite the crime's brutality, the Court commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, holding that while death is reserved for the rarest cases, inordinate and unexplained procedural delay necessitated commutation. Life imprisonment was ordered to mean the petitioner's entire remaining life.
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