Abolish Death Penalty India: June 2014

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Public Consultation Paper On The Death Penalty

Dear Friends, For those who oppose capital punishment in India, this is the time to make your views and voices count. The Law Commission has issued a public consultation paper on the death penalty. The consultation note and questionnaire are attached separately to this email. (See also link below). I cannot emphasise strongly enough the need for citizens to write in with their views on this very important subject. Convicts are executed in our names, and if we don't want this to happen, we should speak out. There will be few more opportune moments to do so. The Law Commission's views command a great deal of respect in court and in Parliament. Each constitutional challenge to the death penalty in the Supreme Court has failed thus far, and each time the Supreme Court quoted the Law Commission's views articulated in its 35th Report. The Law Commission's only report (35th Report) on the death penalty (see link below) was begun more than 50 years ago in 1962 and was completed shortly after the Indo-China war. It concluded thus: “Having regard, however, to the conditions in India, to the variety of social upbringing of its inhabitants, to the disparity in the level of morality and education in the country, to the vastness of its area, to the diversity of its population and to the paramount need for maintaining law and order in the country at the present juncture, India cannot risk the experiment of abolition of capital punishment.” (emphasis added) A lot has changed since this report was published. For example: 1. The murder rate has declined continuously for the last 22 years. 2. The Supreme Court has repeatedly admitted that the death penalty has been inflicted arbitrarily, unfairly, subjectively and inconsistently. The Court has said that death sentencing depends more on the personal predilections of the sentencing judge than on the facts of the case. 3. The Supreme Court has also admitted that a large number of people have been wrongly sentenced to death and executed. 4. In 1967, just a handful of countries had abolished the death penalty in law or practise. Today, more than two-thirds of the world's countries eschew capital punishment. 5. In 1967, the normal punishment for murder was the death sentence. Today, it is only in the rarest of rare cases that the death sentence is handed out. It is actually executed in even fewer cases. This drastic decline in the use of capital punishment has not increased crime; in fact it is has coincided with the decline in the murder rate. In India, we use capital punishment so infrequently (8 executions for every lakh murders), we may as well not have it all. Moreover, there is no rational basis for selecting these 8 as being especially deserving of capital punishment. 6. In India, we did not have any executions between 2004 - 2012, and there was no corresponding impact on the murder rate. If anything at all, the murder rate kept decreasing. This shows that we can easily do without capital punishment and it does not serve any utilitarian purpose. 6. Countries with a lower Human Development Index (HDI) than India's have abolished capital punishment with no tangible negative consequences. If Haiti, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Paraguay, South Africa, Senegal, Philippines, Rwanda, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Bolivia -- with lower HDI and higher murder rates -- can do away with capital punishment, surely we can too. 7. Studies around the world have shown that the death penalty has no greater deterrent value than life imprisonment. Please circulate news of this consultation widely in email groups, social media etc so that as many people as possible write in with their views and comments. Please take the trouble to fill in the questionnaire and return it to the Law Commission at the following address: Member-Secretary Law Commission of India, 14th Floor, Hindustan Times House Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi – 110 001 Tel.:+91 – 011- 23355738, 23355742; Fax: (0091)/011 - 23736744 E-mail: lci-dla@nic.in Website: http://lawcommissionofindia.nic.in/

The Death Penalty Scenario in India

India is one of the 193 countries that retains death penalty. There has always been a few imminent judges who have pronounced compelling verdicts upholding the rights of prisoners on death row. There has been increasing debate in various platforms advocating abolition of death penalty or at least to rethink sentencing policies in India. The Indian government has however always been committed to the retention of the death penalty, irrespective of their political ideology. India has voted against a United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) draft resolution on the use of death penalty, saying it goes against the statutory law of the country where an execution is carried out in the "rarest of rare" cases. India retains the death penalty as punishment for a number of crimes including murder, kidnapping, terrorism, desertion, inducement to suicide of a minor or a mentally-retarded person and has more recently in 2013 come to include the offence of rape in certain circumstances. Most recently, there is an outrage over child rape and murder.

After observing an unofficial moratorium of 8 years in India, the Indian Government in November 2012 carried out the execution of Ajmal Kasab, convicted in the Mumbai attacks case, without public knowledge. This was followed by the secret execution of Afzal Guru, convicted in the Parliament attack case of 2001, in February 2013, under similar circumstances, without intimating his immediate family or affording a chance of judicial review. In both cases, the executions were carried out under covert operations conducted by the Government immediately upon rejection of their mercy petitions. Before these executions, the last execution to be carried out in India was that of Dhananjoy Chatterjee in 2004 who was convicted of rape and murder and which sentence was carried out after he had spent 13 years in solitary confinement. Following this, several mercy petitions of death row convicts have come to be rejected. The fear of execution of such convicts is imminent. Bolstered by the Government's unapologetic conduct and public outcry, especially in recent cases of rape and murder reported in the country, the courts are continuing to hand down death sentences at an alarming rate.

In the recent past, there have been a few empirical studies (mainly four) conducted with prisoners on death row. This has highlighted the situation of prisoners on death row.

(1) Most recently the India Exclusion Report 2017-18 found that fair trial rights and guarantees are reduced to a nullity and seeks to breach the citadel of the collective silence. It further said that Convicts on death row in India belong to groups marginalised along the axes of caste, religion, economic vulnerability and educational deprivation, and their fair trial rights, though a part of the Right to Life guaranteed by the Constitution, are invariably non-existent, a survey of 371 out of the 385 persons living under the death sentence and their families has revealed.

(2) Another study was The Death Penalty Research Project (2015) which was conceived with an aim to document the socio-economic profile of prisoners sentenced to death in India and map their experience within the criminal justice system.

There were two other academic studies that were done conducted by Dr. Reena Mary George –

(3)“Voices of prisoners surviving the death row in India” (2014) done through the University of Vienna under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Christoph Reinprecht (Sociology) and Prof. Dr. Manfred Nowak (Law and Ex-United Nations Rapporteur on Torture). George’s research highlights three salient features, namely: poverty, social exclusion and marginalisation are antecedent to death penalty; death penalty is a constructed account by the state machinery; and prisoners on death row situate dignity higher in the juxtaposition of death and dignity.

(4) Another one “Death Penalty – A Human Rights Perspective” (2009) done through the University of Mumbai under the guidance of Retired Justice Hosbet Suresh. This was a study in Maharashtra with the objectives to firstly study the impact of death penalty on the social, mental, and physical being of the inmate and secondly, to study the perception of opinion leaders on death penalty with reference to human rights. All the above reports are public documents.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, Prison Statistics 2015, there are 101 prisoners sentenced to death. The actual figure of sentences originally awarded is much higher considering the death sentences of 49 convicts came to be commuted to life imprisonment in the said period. As of today, almost in 2019, the figures are unknown through government statistics, however, research centres claim this figure to be around 371 convicts. During the 1980s the Supreme Court sought to restrict the use of the death penalty by characterizing it as a punishment reserved only for the “rarest of the rare” cases. The doctrine has not had the desired effect. According to a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court, Rajindar Sachar: “after the rarest of rare doctrine was introduced in 1980, the Supreme Court confirmed death penalty in 40 per cent of cases in the period 1980-90 while it was 37.7 per cent between 1970 and 1980. For the high courts it rose from 59 per cent in 1970-80 to 65 per cent during 1980-90”. Over the past two decades the death penalty has been extended to include more crimes and been handed down with increasing frequency.

Most recently while commuting a sentence in Supreme Court (2018), Justice Joseph did not seek the reconsideration of the Bachan Singh judgment, but only sought to re-examine the purpose and practice of the death penalty, and whether as a punishment, it serves any goal at all. In other words, the death penalty can continue to remain constitutionally valid because of the Bachan Singh judgment, but its application in substantive cases coming before the court must be restricted to only those cases which meet the criteria laid down in that case.

While updating the blog and conducting my own empirical studies, I observed the heinous nature of the crimes that were committed and thought about the families, about their loss, about the victims who for no fault of their own died. If I lost my relative or a dear friend, would I still oppose death penalty and would I still advocate to abolish the death sentence? Having worked in the criminal justice system and also having the seen the other side, where often it is the marginalized, vulnerable and oppressed who are on death row makes me want to advocate for abolition of this punishment. Victims should definitely get justice for their loss, for their pain. No one should escape the rule of law. As long as humanity exists; crime will exist. Should we not re-consider our sentencing policies?

Reena Mary George