India still exercises the right to award the death sentence to juvenile offenders, as the writer and editors of this website are all to aware, with a case (im)pending in the Supreme Court of India concerning the execution of the death sentence on a juvenile offender who none disagree was 17 at the date of commission of his offence (the case of Om Prakash alias Israil Lakra, see above). The case has as its main contention that the boy was actually only 14 years old at the date of commission of his crime (according to his parents, and his school certificates) but, either way, the Indian State has still confirmed through the Supreme Court, on ‘Appeal’ and on ‘Review’ of that Appeal, that the man is to be hanged. Thus India has some way to catch up to the ‘evolving standards of decency’ recognised even by a nation as zealous in its application of the death penalty as the United states of America. India, indeed, still has to ‘evolve’ in such thinking, and it may well be the role of the judiciary here to take the lead in the ‘enlightenment,’ at least with respect to the issue of the execution of juvenile offenders, and with the thorny and apparently anti-popularist issue of the death penalty, per se. In this, the courage of the Supreme Court of the United States should be looked at and admired for their decision in Simmons, especially given that a clear majority of the 22 juvenile offenders executed since 1990 have been executed by the State of Texas, in which George Bush Junior – the incumbent Republican President of the USA and, ergo, ‘the most powerful man in the world’– played his part whilst Governor of his home-state.