The Supreme Court held that the Governor of a State can pardon prisoners, including death row ones, even before they have served a minimum 14 years of prison sentence.

In fact, the Governor’s power to pardon overrides a provision in the Code of Criminal Procedure — Section 433A —which mandates that a prisoner’s sentence can be remitted only after 14 years of jail, a Bench of Justices Hemant Gupta and A.S. Bopanna observed in a judgment.

 The pardoning powers of the President:

• Under Article 72 of the Constitution, “the President shall have the power to grant pardons, reprieves, respites or remissions of punishment or to suspend, remit or commute the sentence of any person convicted of any offence where the sentence is a sentence of death”. 
• Under Article 161, the Governor too has pardoning powers, but these do not extend to death sentences.

Exercise of these powers:

• The President cannot exercise his power of pardon independent of the government. 
• Rashtrapati Bhawan forwards the mercy plea to the Home Ministry, seeking the Cabinet’s advice.
• The Ministry in turn forwards this to the concerned state government; based on the reply, it formulates its advice on behalf of the Council of Ministers.

Kind of pardons:

There are five kinds of pardons according to the constitution:

1. Pardon–  It removes both the sentence and the conviction and completely absolves the convict from all sentences, punishments and disqualifications, and places the convict in the same position as if he had never committed the offence.
2. Commutation– Commutation denotes the substitution of one form of punishment for a lighter form. In simple words to replace the punishment with less severe punishment. 
3. Reprieve– Reprieve implies a stay of the execution of a sentence, especially
4. Death sentence, for a temporary period. For example- pending a proceeding for pardon or commutation.
5. Respite– Respite denotes awarding a lesser sentence in place of one originally awarded due to some special fact. such as the physical disability of a convict or the pregnancy of a woman offender.
6. Remissions– Remission means the reduction of the amount of sentence without changing its character, for example,a sentence of rigorous imprisonment for two years may be remitted to rigorous imprisonment for one year.

Source: The Hindu