A/HRC/4/20 page 17 idiosyncratic circumstances would make the death penalty permissible for one, but impermissible for another in superficially similar circumstances demonstrated the impossibility of a just mandatory death penalty, concluding that: “It has to be remembered that the measure of punishment for an offence is not afforded by the label which that offence bears, as for example ‘Theft’, ‘Breach of Trust’ or ‘Murder’. The gravity of the offence furnishes the guideline for punishment and one cannot determine how grave the offence is without having regard to the circumstances in which it was committed, its motivation and its repercussions. The legislature cannot make relevant circumstances irrelevant, deprive courts of their legitimate jurisdiction to exercise their discretion not to impose the death sentence in appropriate cases, compel them to shut their eyes to mitigating circumstances and inflict upon them the dubious and unconscionable duty of imposing a preordained sentence of death. … A standardized mandatory sentence, and that too in the form of a sentence of death, fails to take into account the facts and circumstances of each particular case. It is those facts and circumstances which constitute a safe guideline for determining the question of sentence in each individual case. The infinite variety of cases and facets to each would make general standards either meaningless ‘boiler plate’ or a statement of the obvious. … The task performed by the legislature while enacting [mandatory death penalty legislation] is beyond even the present human ability … .”153 60. The approach uniformly shared by international human rights bodies is entirely consistent with the Court’s conclusion that “law ceases to have respect and relevance when it compels the dispensers of justice to deliver blind verdicts by decreeing that no matter what the circumstances of the crime, the criminal shall be hanged by the neck until he is dead”.154 61. Such a conclusion could only be rejected were one to reject the long-standing jurisprudence of the Human Rights Committee that the right to life is the “supreme right” and that “the deprivation of life by the authorities of the State is a matter of the utmost gravity”. Accordingly, “the law must strictly control and limit the circumstances in which a person may be deprived of his life by such authorities”.155 It has thus been consistently found in practice that permitting mandatory death sentences makes it inevitable that some persons will be sentenced to death even though that sentence is disproportionate to the facts of their crimes. Whatever inexactitude might be tolerated in determining the size of a fine or the length of a sentence in years, uncertainty in the decision between life and death is incompatible with the strict control with which the law must protect the right to life. As the Supreme Court of the United States held when ending that country’s use of the mandatory death penalty: “the penalty of death is qualitatively different from a sentence of imprisonment, however long. Death, in its finality, differs more from life imprisonment than a 100-year prison term differs from one of only a year or two. Because of that qualitative difference, there is a corresponding difference in the need for reliability in the determination that death is the appropriate punishment in a specific case”.156 62. It is clear, therefore, that in death penalty cases, individualized sentencing by the judiciary is required to prevent cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment and the arbitrary deprivation of life.