and this, he stated, was the first step back into society and should be treated as a mitigating circumstance. He therefore opined that the appropriate punishment in this case would be life imprisonment without remission. Role of public opinion The role of public opinion first gained prominence in the capital sentencing framework through the case of Machhi Singh v. State of Punjab, July 1983, which allowed imposition of the death penalty in case of anti-social or socially abhorrent nature of the crime. Subsequently, in the case of Dhananjoy Chatterjee v. State of West Bengal, January 1994, the Supreme Court held that the punishment must befit the crime so that courts reflect public abhorrence of the crime. It held that courts must consider not only the rights of the criminal, but also the rights of the victim and society at large while considering the question of appropriate sentence. Recently, in MA Antony v. State of Kerala, December 2018, the Supreme Court commuted the death sentence into life imprisonment and noted that the trial court committed an error by taking into account the disturbance caused by the crime to the collective conscience of the society. It was held that reference to public opinion and what is perceived by the judges to be the collective conscience of the society must be avoided while sentencing a convict guilty of a brutal crime. However, public opinion and collective conscience have played a major role in imposition of the death penalty in several cases in India, including Mukesh v. State of NCT Delhi, May 2017, which resulted in the execution in March 2020 of four persons convicted of gang rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi. Residual doubt In Ashok Debbarma v. State of Tripura, March 2014, the Supreme Court commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment with a minimum of twenty years. It introduced the concept of 'residual doubt' as a mitigating circumstance in Indian sentencing jurisprudence. The court stated that there could be a state of lingering uncertainty that exists, beyond 'reasonable doubt' but below 'absolute certainty'. In 2019, the Supreme Court reiterated the 'residual doubt principle' of Ashok Debbarma in Ravishankar v. State of Madhya Pradesh, October 2019 and held that it creates a higher standard of proof over and above the 'beyond reasonable doubt' threshold in order to sentence someone to death. Life imprisonment without remission or parole Union of