Do you know that former president Pranab Mukherjee, who passed away on August 31 at the age of 84, had disposed off 34 mercy pleas which requested him to convert death sentence into life when he was serving his presidential tenure (it will be 35, if one considers the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts accused Yakub Memon who appealed for the presidential pardon twice but it got rejected).
When Mukherjee demitted the office of the President of India, he left behind an in-tray empty of mercy petitions which requested him to commute a death sentence to life.
During five years of his presidency, Mukherjee rejected 30 mercy petitions (31 including Memon’s follow-up plea), and delivered fresh leases on lives in four other cases thereby setting a record of rejecting mercy petitions which remains unparalleled among his immediate predecessors.
In the history of the Indian republic, he is second to President R Venkatraman, who rejected 45 mercy pleas.
When Mukherjee’s successor, Ram Nath Kovind assumed office, the has no pending mercy pleas to act upon, which was an event that did not happen in three presidencies.
When Mukherjee became president in 2012 on July 25, he inherited at least 10 pending mercy please, including one from President KR Narayanan’s term which was from 1997-2002.
It needs to be mentioned here that President KR Narayanan as well as his successor President Abdul Kalam (2002-2007) share the distinguished distinction of sitting on mercy petitions.
The Law Commission in a 2015 report had put the “brakes on the disposal of mercy petitions.”