This is the second part of a three-part series on death penalty. Click here to read part one.
On 19 September this year, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court referred the question of what constitutes a “meaningful, real, and effective” hearing for an accused when it comes to death penalty sentencing, to a five-judge constitution bench.
The referral indicates the apex court's acknowledgement of the "helpless disadvantage" placed on the convict in the present manner of sentencing carried out by trial courts. A perusal of existing statistics and case studies indicates that these violations result in the bypassing of:
Possibility of the convict's reformation
Presentation of mitigating circumstances that might help the convict's case
Meanwhile, India in 2021 saw the highest number of prisoners on death row at the end of the year since 2016 at 488, an increase of nearly 21 percent from 2020, as per a report by Project 39A, a criminal reforms advocacy group.
As per the Prison Statistics of India reports released by the National Crime Records Bureau, this is the highest the death row population has been since 2004, when it was 563.
So why are hundreds of persons languishing for years on the death row? How do trial courts violate sentencing guidelines? And how did we reach here?