Section 393(5) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita directs that a person sentenced to death shall be hanged by the neck till he is dead. The wording has survived largely unchanged since it first appeared in the criminal procedure code of 1861. Hanging in India follows the long-drop method, in which the drop height is calculated from the condemned person's height and weight so as to produce a fracture-dislocation of the cervical vertebrae at C2-C3 and near-instant unconsciousness. The petition argued that this design does not reliably deliver what it promises. It relied on a 1992 study of 34 people hanged in England between 1882 and 1945, in which the classic hangman's fracture causing near-instant death was found in only three cases while six died of asphyxiation. From this the petitioners argued that hanging is mechanically unpredictable: too short a drop causes death by slow strangulation, too long a drop risks decapitation. The constitutional claim was that Article 21, which includes the right to live and die with dignity as held in Gian Kaur v. State of Punjab (1996), obliges the State to adopt the least painful method available, and that constitutional protection does not cease at the gallows.

The ruling is a compact lesson in how constitutional challenges to long-settled criminal law actually work. The petitioners did not argue that the death penalty itself is unconstitutional, a question settled in Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab (1980) with its rarest of rare doctrine; they argued about the method. That narrower framing runs into two structural obstacles the judgment names explicitly. The first is bench strength: a two-judge bench cannot simply set aside a three-judge decision affirmed by a Constitution Bench, so the petitioner had to show that the factual foundation of Deena had collapsed, not merely that it could be argued differently. The second is the separation of powers: when Parliament rewrites an entire code and consciously carries a provision forward, a court treats that as a deliberate legislative choice rather than an oversight, and Law Commission recommendations, however persuasive, remain advisory. The Court's closing caveat is equally instructive: it declined on the evidence before it, not on principle, and said the Union remains free to review execution methods through an expert body. That is judicial restraint with a stated route for change, and it makes a good example in answers on the limits of judicial review of legislative policy.