Death Penalty News

On November 21, 2012, Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, a Pakistani national and the only surviving gunman involved in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, was executed after Indian President Pranab Mukherjee denied his mercy plea. The decision marked the end of an informal 8-year moratorium on capital punishment in the country. In the 3 years since Kasab's execution, 2 more convicts, Mohammad Afzal Guru and Yakub Abdul Razak Memon, were also hanged for their involvement in terrorist attacks in the 1990s and 2000s. Moreover, even though these are the only executions the Indian state has carried out since 2004, roughly 5,000 convicts have been sentenced to death over the same period and are currently on death row. One might ask, why this disparity between the number of convicts and actual executions? The answer is likely to be that international and domestic pressures have made the government more hesitant to implement capital punishment. Nevertheless, a new trend worth noting within this pattern of dis...

Who gets the death penalty in India? The Death Penalty India Report  (pdf), brought out by the National Law University last month, attempts an answer. A 1-of-its-kind study, it documents the socio-economic profiles of prisoners sentenced to death, as also their engagement with the criminal justice system. Here, rather than the crime they were party to, the focus is on the lives they led and the legal aid they had access to before receiving the death penalty. The report documents the stories of 373 of the 385 prisoners on death row countrywide. This includes stories of their families, too, some of whom cooperated in the exercise and some didn't. The 2 1/2 year long study was aided by over 80 undergraduate law students and volunteers. The 2-volume, 384-page report attempts to go beyond the 'for vs against' debate on death penalty. "For an issue as grave as this, there have been far too few attempts in India to understand questions about who gets the death pena...

The 1st comprehensive report on death-row prisoners by the National Law University , which identified 385 prisoners and received access to 373 of them, reveals certain infirmities that would question the basis upon which death penalties are awarded.  Confirming studies in other countries that the death penalty is more likely to be imposed on poorer victims, the NLU report says that 74.1 % of those on death row hail from economically vulnerable groups.  The implications of this are immense: what it tells us is the quality of legal help that they could afford, the most crucial factor that would have ensured that these prisoners were spared the gallows.  The report also notes that 61 % of the prisoners had not completed secondary school, which explains socio-economic status and their inability to study case files and court documents to build a better defence case for themselves.  More damningly, the report notes that of 191 of the prisoners who spoke ...

Opposition to the death penalty is often rooted in arguments about its irreversibility, its essential cruelty, the possibility of error and the false sense of justice in doing unto convicted murderers what they had done to their victims. In the Indian context, politics surrounding the prisoners’ ethnic origin or linguistic affinity is often the basis for pleas for clemency. Rarely is a more compelling reason invoked: the possibility of an offender’s economic background, educational level, social status or religious identity working against his interests in legal proceedings. A report released on Friday by the National Law University , Delhi, on the working of the death penalty in India provides validation and proof for something that those familiar with administration of justice knew all along: that most of those sentenced to death in the country are poor and uneducated; and many belong to religious minorities. In addition, a revealing number is that as many as 241 out of 385 death ...

The Death Penalty Research Project, undertaken by researchers at the National Law University in Delhi, found that over 80 per cent of prisoners facing capital punishment had not completed school and nearly half had begun working before the age of 18.  The first comprehensive study of the socio-economic profile of prisoners serving the death sentence in India has revealed that most are from economically vulnerable sections, backward communities and religious minority groups. The Death Penalty Research Project, undertaken by researchers at the National Law University in Delhi, found that over 80 per cent of prisoners facing capital punishment had not completed school and nearly half had begun working before the age of 18. Besides, it found, a quarter of the convicts were either juveniles or between the age of 18 and 21 or above 60 years when the crime was committed. Dalits and Adivasis constituted 24.5 per cent (90 prisoners) among those on death row, whom the study ga...

The execution of Yakub Memon, one of the accused in 1993 Bombay bombings, last year ignited the debate on 'capital punishment' with pro- and anti-death punishment brigades making ferocious arguments to prove their points. While arguments against Yakub's hanging addressed specific procedural facts of the case, it also brought forth the debate on the desirability of the death sentence as we call it in India. The massive unrest that was witnessed on the JNU campus over the last 3 months was an offshoot of long resentment of a group of students over the execution of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. At the heart of it, however, was the objection to the death sentence in principle. In this backdrop, 'Death Penalty India Report' released on Friday by the Center of Death Penalty at National Law University, Delhi assumes great significance as it raises serious questions on the criminal justice system in the country. Anup Surendranath, Director, Centre on...

A total of 241 persons out of the 385 death row inmates in India are 1st time offenders, new findings contained in the " Death Penalty India Report " released on Friday said.  For the study, 373 of all the 385 death row inmates in India were interviewed from July 2013 to January 2015 by the Center of Death Penalty at National Law University, Delhi. The study found that around 60 % of the prisoners did not complete secondary education and nearly 75 % belong to economically vulnerable sections. Education levels affect the extent to which the death row prisoners are able to understand details of the case filed against them; lack of which results in alienation from the system. Education level Further, 3/4 of the prisoners sentenced to death belong to backward classes and religious minorities. While this finding does not imply direct discrimination, it reflects structural concerns which disempowers the marginalised, as explained below. Prior criminal rec...