100 when it comes to sentencing. It concludes that death penalty sentencing in India has been based on an arbitrary application of the Bachan Singh principle, and has become judge-centric, based on the personal predilection of judges – a concern which was alluded to even by this court in Swamy Shraddananda (2) @ Mural Manohar Mishra v. State of Karnataka 87 and analysed extensively again in Santosh Bariyar, followed by Sangeet & Anr. v. State of Haryana88, Mohd. Farooq Abdul Gafur & Anr. v. State of Maharashtra 89, and more recently in Chhannu Lal Verma v. State of Chattisgarh90 (hereafter ‘Chhannu Lal Verma’). The death penalty framework and how to apply it for ‘principled sentencing’ 187. This court in Bachan Singh while upholding the constitutionality of capital punishment, categorically ruled that the new CrPC of 1973 marked a shift as it bifurcated the criminal trial to include a pre-sentence hearing (under S. 235(2)), and further mandated the sentencing court to outline the “special reasons” (under S. 354(3)) or absence of them, by considering circumstances both of the crime and the criminal. The court also noted that while broad guidelines or indicators may be given, they cannot be put into water-tight compartments that curb discretion of any judge to do justice in a given individual case: “163. ….Now, Section 235(2) provides for a bifurcated trial and specifically gives the accused person a right of pre-sentence hearing, at which stage, he can bring on record material or evidence, which may not be strictly relevant to or connected with the particular crime under inquiry, but nevertheless, have, consistently with the policy underlined in Section 354(3), a bearing on the choice of sentence. The present legislative policy discernible from Section 235(2) read with Section 354(3) is that in fixing the degree of punishment or making the choice of sentence for various offences, including one under Section 302 of the Penal Code, the court should not confine its consideration “principally” or merely to the circumstances connected with the particular crime, but also give due consideration to the circumstances of the criminal. *** 87 (2008) 13 SCC 767 88 (2013) 2 SCC 452 89 (2010) 14 SCC 641 90 (2019) 12 SCC 438