with the legal policy on sentencing discretion and also comprehensively discussed the meaning of 'special reasons' for inflicting death sentence on exceptional grounds. The Court departed from retributive theory and emphasized on the deterrence and reformative theory as the social goals. Furthermore, the Court held that the 'special reasons' required to impose the capital punishment must not relate to the crime, but focus must be on the criminal. Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab, May 1980 The constitutional validity of death penalty was again challenged in the Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab, in May 1980, and it was premised on multiple new developments. Firstly, the re-enactment of CrPC 1973 had made the death penalty as an exception with regards to the rule of imposing life imprisonment for offences consist of choice between life imprisonment and death sentence. Secondly, the dictum of Rajendra Prasad v. State of Uttar Pradesh, February 1979, had interpreted the parameter on which 'death sentence' must be related to circumstance of the criminal and not the crime itself. Thirdly, it reviewed the death sentence in the light of Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, January 1978 since every punitive action must satisfy the test of reasonableness after satisfying the golden triangle test of Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Indian Constitution. The primary challenges to the death penalty in Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab, May 1980 was that the death punishment is unnecessary, cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and the punishment of death sentence does not serve the purpose of deterrence. Furthermore, the constitutional validity of Section 302 of IPC and Section 366(2) of CrPC was challenged in this case on the ground that the imposition of death penalty is arbitrary and whimsical. However, the Supreme Court by a majority of 4:1 did not accept this contention and affirmed the constitutional validity of death sentence but propounded the doctrine of 'rarest of rare' as that the death sentence can only imposed 'in the rarest of rare cases when the alternative option is unquestionably foreclosed." Moreover, the Supreme Court ascertained that the "special reasons" in the context of inflicting death sentence must pay due regard to both the crime and criminal and the relative weight has to be given both aggravating and mitigating circumstance prior to the stating of special reasons for inflicting the death sentence. The Supreme Court recognized that the mitigating factors includes