Death penalty

Our initiation into the criminal justice system was through the death penalty in India. Despite being the harshest punishment in our legal system, there was very little empirical information on the administration of the death penalty, including uncertainty about the number of people India had executed or information about prisoners who are sentenced to death. An effort to fill that gap led to our foundational work - the Death Penalty India Report (May 2016). Between 2013-15, we interviewed all of India’s death row prisoners and their families to document their socio-economic profile and map their interaction with the criminal justice system.

Information gathered during the fieldwork for the Death Penalty India Report demonstrated the urgent need to design interventions that would provide quality legal representation to individuals sentenced to death. Our litigation efforts over the years have constantly drawn lessons from this experience and many of the practices we have adopted are designed to fill the gaps observed. Challenging the conviction as well as the sentence is a core commitment of our litigation practice. We have also invested significantly in developing a mitigation investigation practice to aid and develop the sentencing practices in our criminal courts; an exercise mandated by the death penalty sentencing framework in India. A central component of our work is maintaining regular communication with the prisoners we represent and their families, through letters and prison visits.

A measured and progressive expansion of the death penalty discourse in India demands that existing assumptions about capital punishment be challenged. Our research is, thus, grounded in an interdisciplinary approach and actively engages with penal philosophy, criminology, forensic science, psychiatry, and law. Our focus also lies in analysing contemporary and archival data in India to gauge the functioning of existing institutional stakeholders within the criminal justice system. Our efforts to understand the death penalty rests on in-depth research on various aspects of its administration in India. Sentencing practices at all levels of the judiciary, mental health of death row prisoners, and opinion studies have been particular areas of interest. Since 2016, through our Annual Statistics reports, we have also emerged as the most authoritative source for the number of death sentences imposed in India every year.

Death Penalty India Report 

The Death Penalty India Report (2016) is the genesis of our death penalty work. Based on interviews with all (373) prisoners sentenced to death and their families, the report is a significant contribution to developing empirical research on the death penalty in India, the socio-economic status of prisoners sentenced to death and its impact on their  interaction with the criminal justice system. The report is divided into two volumes with a combination of quantitative and qualitative research that provides deep insights into the use and impact of the death penalty in India.  

The report finds that an overwhelming majority of those on death row are economically vulnerable, and belong to backward classes and religious minorities. Through narratives of prisoners and their families, the report also documents the experience in custody, during trial and appeal, highlighting the infirmities within the criminal justice system. 

Matters of Judgement 

Matters of Judgment is an opinion study on the death penalty and the criminal juustice based on interviews with 60 former Indian Supreme Court judges. The study was an attempt to understand judicial thought and adjudicatory processes that govern the administration of the death penalty within India’s criminal justice system. The report records an overwhelming acknowledgment among the former judges about the crisis in criminal justice system on account of the widespread use of torture, fabrication of evidence, abysmal quality of legal aid and wrongful convictions, without these concerns having any bearing on their views on the death penalty. The study reveals a wide variance in the understanding of the ‘rarest of rare’ doctrine based predominantly on the nature of crime. The nature of retentionist arguments provided by the former judges points to the legal discourse on death penalty being driven by a retributive instinct in response to ‘brutality’ rather than any real commitment to principled sentencing.  

Death Penalty Sentencing in Trial Courts: Delhi Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra (2000-2015)

This report offers an insight into the interpretation and application of the ‘rarest of rare’ capital sentencing framework originally developed by the Constitution bench of the Indian Supreme Court in Bachan Singh v State of Punjab (1980), at the trial court level. It also offers a doctrinal critique of the Bachan Singh framework and its evolution thereafter which has contributed to the errors in the last four decades. The report is based on analysis of all (215) death sentences imposed on 322 persons by trial courts of Delhi, Madhya and Maharashtra over a 16 year period, between 2000 and 2015. The report exposes the superficial nature of capital sentencing hearings conducted by trial courts. It also demonstrates the normative and procedural gaps in the capital sentencing framework in India that have been inherited from the Bachan Singh judgment and have been carried over in the subsequent Supreme Court decisions in the last 40 years.

Mental Health and The Death Penalty

This is the first of its kind empirical and descriptive study to take a psychosocial approach to the mental health of death row prisoners in India. The study was conceived out of the need to collect accurate data on death row prisoners, through an empirical and descriptive study, in order to broaden the current sphere of knowledge on the death penalty.

Through this study, we aim to examine the presence of mental illness and intellectual disability among death row prisoners. An important component of the project is bringing forth narratives, through an interpretive and phenomenological lens,  on the lived experience of prisoners while on death row with a focus on mental health. The study also delves into the lifetime vulnerabilities of death row prisoners and adverse experiences that have marked their lives. We have interviewed over 90 death row prisoners and their families, across prisons in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Kerala and Karnataka.

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