This is the fifth edition of the
Death Penalty in India: Annual Statistics Report published by Project 39A at National Law University, Delhi.
Over the course of five years, the law and the implementation of the death penalty in India have seen
significant changes.
2020 saw the only execution in these five years, with the execution of Mukesh, Akshay Kumar Singh, Vinay Sharma and Pawan Kumar on 20th March 2020. They were convicted and sentenced to death for the gangrape and murder of a woman in Delhi in December 2012.
In 2018, the highest number of death sentences was imposed in a single year over two decades. 2019 and 2020 saw a decrease in the number of death sentences imposed, with 2020’s drop a result of the pandemic’s impact on court functioning.
However, the proportion of cases of sexual violence has steadily increased over the years, now constituting 65% of cases in which death sentence was imposed by trial courts in 2020. This indicates that sexual violence is increasingly influencing the implementation of the death penalty in India.
Corresponding to this shift, these five years have seen the legislative expansion of the death penalty for non-homicide offences of sexual violence. Amendments to the Indian Penal Code in 2018 and to the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act in 2019 introduced the death penalty for non-homicide child sexual abuse. In addition, both Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh introduced bills that imposed the death penalty for non-homicide rape of adult women.
Exceptional contributions by Ashna D (IV year law student at the National University of Advanced Legal Studies, Kochi) as well as Harjaap Singh Ahluwalia and Varsha Sharma and (II and V year law students at National Law University, Delhi respectively) were instrumental in the development of the new database and in compiling the statistics for the present report.
None of this would have been possible without the efforts of Varsha Sharma and Pritam Raman Giriya (IV year law students at National Law University, Delhi) who were instrumental in the development of the directory and in the publication of annual statistics reports since it was first published in 2017. Lubhyathi Rangarajan, Peter John, Poornima Rajeshwar, Rahul Raman, Neetika Vishwanath and Preeti
Pratishruti Dash have played key roles in authoring previous editions of the report
Source: project39a.com, Staff, January 2021
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
