Death Penalty and the Indian Supreme Court (2007-2021)

Description

Death Penalty and the Indian Supreme Court (2007-2021) maps the important trends and developments in the Supreme Court’s death penalty jurisprudence. These past 15 years have witnessed significant developments in the law on capital sentencing, post-mercy jurisprudence, and other procedural developments pertaining to the administration of the death penalty. Imagined as an intellectual successor of PUCL and Amnesty International’s doctrinal study of the Supreme Court’s death penalty cases between 1950 to 2006, in ‘Lethal Lottery: The Death Penalty in India’, this report highlights the sustained inconsistency and judge-centric reasoning in capital cases, with particular emphasis on the problem of arbitrariness in approaches to capital sentencing at the Supreme Court. This data report highlights the extent of qualitative variations in approaches to capital sentencing, and significant principled divergence in reasoning in commutation and confirmation decisions. In confirmation cases, there is a tendency to emphasise circumstances pertaining to the brutality of the offence, without effective engagement with offender-related circumstances. Even commutation decisions reveal a lack of clarity about the normative content and the impact of different sentencing factors on the moral culpability and probability of reform of the accused. The absence of normative coherence and procedural clarity, in the Supreme Court’s capital sentencing jurisprudence, has resulted in sustained arbitrariness and judge-centric reasoning in the imposition of the death penalty. This data report confirms that the confusion in capital sentencing at the trial court is reflected in the Supreme Court as well. Further, this report suggests that inconsistencies at the Supreme Court trickle down and permeate capital sentencing in trial courts, contributing to the poorly reasoned and consistently high number of death sentences. This can be attributed to the highest court’s inability to adequately resolve doctrinal deviations from the Bachan Singh (1980) framework, and provide normative and procedural clarity for principled sentencing.