LiveLaw.com reported earlier today that President Pranab Mukherjee commuted the sentence of four death-row convicts to life imprisonment on January 1st. All well and good if you are an unqualified opponent of the death sentence (and The Dormant Lawyer is not one, more on that some other time though). What is singular about this particular act of pardon is that apparently it came against the advice of the Ministry of Home Affairs. According to that LiveLaw report, "this is perhaps the first time that the President used his discretion while considering a mercy petition from a death row convict".
Now, I wish folks at places like LiveLaw stop using terms such as "perhaps". Also, it is not clear whether the above refers to the current President or to Indian Presidents in general. Since the Dormant Lawyer is also the Dormant Teacher, the Dormant Consultant, the Dormant Mentor and the Dormant Rentier this week, he's set out to answer these questions for himself. More on this soon!
Use of definite article 'the' seems to be a pointer (though not an absolute clincher)to the incumbent. Use of indefinite article 'a' would have indicated all Indian Presidents since 26 Jan 1950. However, such a syntactic discernment may not always be reflected in contemporary writing,hermeneutical axioms notwithstanding.
ReplyDeleteIndeed! I was actually giving them the benefit of doubt by wondering if they're talking about all Presidents till date. Because if they're talking only about one Prez, they really have no excuse to use "perhaps"!
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