the mental condition, the age of the accused, the possibility of reforming or that the person committed the crime under the superior orders. The Supreme Court recognized and emphasized on the individual yet principled sentencing of the death sentence, the court refused to create categories, instead provided discretion to the judges to apply the principled reasoning of inflicting death sentence in each individual case on the basis of aggravating and mitigating circumstances. In the dissenting opinion written by Justice P. N. Bhagawati in August 1982, two years after the majority's decision, he held the death penalty to be unconstitutional. He opined that the capital sentencing system, which required 'special reasons' without any guidance on its meaning, essentially left decision-making to the subjective assessment of individual judges, making it arbitrary. Mithu v. State of Punjab, April 1983 In this case, the court discussed Section 303 of the IPC which provided for a mandatory death sentence for offenders serving a life sentence. This section was based on the logic that any criminal who has been convicted for life and still can kill someone is beyond reformation and so, the only suitable punishment left would be death. It was discussed that the original idea behind drafting of this section was to discourage assaults by life convicts on the prison staff, but the language chosen by the legislature had widely exceeded its intention. It was held that Section 303 violated right to equality and right to life and personal liberty as conferred under Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution. Channulal Verma v. State of Chhattisgarh, November 2018 In Channulal, the Supreme Court, through Justice Kurian Joseph noted that the time was appropriate to review the constitutionality of the death penalty and take into consideration reformative aspects of punishment. While dissenting on the question of propriety of the death penalty, the remaining two judges on the bench emphasized on the duty of courts to be constitutionally correct, even if its views are counter-majoritarian. Public opinion is generally formed by emotionally charged narratives which need not necessarily be legally correct, properly informed. They may even be against the values of rule of law and constitutionalism that courts are bound by. The court reiterated the view in Santosh Kumar Satishbhushan Bariyar v. State of Maharashtra that in death penalty sentencing, public opinion is neither an objective circumstance relating to crime nor to the criminal. The death