Cuttack, Sept. 3: Orissa High Court has ruled that death penalty should not be awarded for murder, even double murder, if the execution of the crime "does not shake the conscience and revolt the mind".

Murders for avarice or greed for property with sharp weapons is not something that is uncommon in our society.

Further, death penalty "should not be awarded only by counting numbers of the cadavers as it is not a safe criterion to determine rarest of rare case", the court has ruled in a recent judgment.

On January 13, the Jajpur sessions judge's court had convicted and sentenced to death one Ganeswar Mahanta for killing his brother's wife and her father.

The twin murder was fallout of an agrarian dispute at a village under Sukinda police station.

While commuting the death sentence to life imprisonment, the division bench of Justice Vinod Prasad and Justice Raghubir Dash observed: "Property dispute since the days of the Mahabharat had resulted in assault and counter assault. Desire to accumulate property is not unknown in the society and many a times, it robs the person of his humanism and saner thoughts, as has happened in the present case. It is the ghastliness of the crime and manner of its execution which is determinative factor to award death sentence to a convict and not to spare life".

"No doubt it is daylight double murder incident where the convict had committed murders of an old man and a lady on the following day on which the daughter of the lady was got married. But while executing the crime, he has acted not in a diabolical and grotesque manner so as to bring his case within the rarest of rare cases," the division bench ruled in its 69-page judgment.

"The degree of gruesomeness depicted by the convict is not of that intense degree which can jolt the conscience and revolt the cognitive faculties", the verdict said, adding: "It cannot be concluded that collective conscience of the society was shaken and that imprisonment of life sentence will not be just, proper and commensurate with the convict's guilt and will be wholly insufficient".

The high court, however, commuted the death sentence for murder charge to life imprisonment with the rider that he shall not be released from jail prior to his completion of 25 years of continuous incarceration without parole and without benefit of set off.

The Supreme Court Constitution Bench had in 1980 in the Bacchan Singh case held that death penalty should be awarded only in "rarest of rare cases", where the crime is considered to be diabolic, grotesque and has shocked the collective conscience of the society.