India, Oct. 29 -- In 1995, nineteen-yearold Christa Pike was arrested in Tennessee for the brutal murder of Colleen Slemmer. By 1996, at just twenty years old, she became the youngest woman sentenced to death in the United States. Following the failed execution, she spent several days on a ventilator and her lawyers assumed she was brain-dead. A prolonged judicial tragedy of this nature-where an individual spends the formative decades of their adult life under the shadow of the gallows, only to still face state-sanctioned termination-is a structural equality impossibility under the legal framework of India.

Through explicit statutory safeguards like Section 428 and Section 436A of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), the Supreme Court ...