103 standardisation was also noted by this court in Swamy Shraddananda (2)93, Sangeet94 and more recently in Justice Sanjiv Khanna’s dissenting opinion in Manoharan v. State by Inspector of Police95. 190. This court in Bachan Singh had warned against categorising cases.96 Rejecting the contention that standards and guidelines should be laid down, it was noted in Bachan Singh that degree of culpability cannot be measured, and aggravating and mitigating circumstances could not be rigidly enumerated so as to exclude “all free play of discretion”. Reiterating that criminal cases cannot be categorised as there were infinite, unpredictable and unforeseen variations, it was held that by such categorization, the sentencing process would cease to be judicial, and such standardisation or sentencing discretion is beyond the court’s function. Therefore, it would be befitting if reliance were placed not solely on those five categories of crimes (which lays undue emphasis on aggravating circumstances) enumerated in Machhi Singh, and instead on the two questiontest, and the four guiding principles of Bachan Singh that were succinctly culled out in Machhi Singh. 191. The decades that followed, has witnessed a line of judgments in which this court has continually taken judicial notice of the incongruence in application of the ‘rarest of rare’ test enunciated in Bachan Singh, and therefore, tried to restrict imposition of the death penalty, in an attempt to strengthen a principled application of the same. 192. This aspect was dealt with extensively in Santosh Bariyar where the court articulated the test to be a two-step process to determine whether a case deserves the death sentence – firstly, that the case belongs to the ‘rarest of rare’ category, and secondly, that the option of life imprisonment would simply not suffice. For the first step, the aggravating and mitigating circumstances would 93 Swamy Shraddananda (2) @ Mural Manohar Mishra v. State of Karnataka (2008) 13 SCC 767 94 Sangeet & Anr. v. State of Haryana (2013) 2 SCC 452 95 Manoharan v. State by Inspector of Police, Variety Hall Police Station, (2019) 7 SCC 716 96 para 169-175, 192-195.