Amnesty Intl reignites death penalty debate in India

According to Mukul Sharma, regional head of Amnesty International, the report titled "Lethal Lottery - The Death Penalty in India, A study of Supreme Court judgments in death penalty cases 1950-2006," a 10-year research of judgments on death sentences handed down over five decades has revealed inconsistencies in the investigation, trial, sentencing and appeal stages.

"The death penalty does not deter crime at all and especially when the judicial system that puts them has been shown by this extensive research to be unfair," Sharma said, urging the Indian Government to join the growing number of nations that have abolished capital punishment.

Huge backlog of cases, cumbersome judicial process and judicial red tape and pressure from human rights groups and political groups have led to executions being stalled, though official records show that 140 convicts have been handed over death penalties in the last two years. The last execution carried out in India was in 2004.

Out of 700 death sentence cases, the Supreme Court has acquitted the convicts in at least 100 of the cases, the human rights watchdog said.

"As the world moves steadily away from the use of the death penalty, the time has come for the Indian authorities to abolish this outmoded form of punishment," the report said, adding, "Amnesty International fears that the leaders of India may lack the political courage and human rights leadership necessary to abolish the death penalty."

According to Sharma, the poor and the illiterate convicts are usually handed the death penalty while most rich or politically influential convicts escape the gallows.

"Most death sentences handed down in India are based on circumstantial evidence and a lot depends on how rich is the under-trial," he said.

Discrepancy in judicial decisions, the Amnesty chief said, is highlighted by the fact that in 86 cases researched by the group, three different courts had passed three different verdicts.

"At the end of the day, life and death in India for the poorer convicts on death row is a like a lottery," Sharma said.

"Death penalty violates the right to life and does not have any place in the modern justice system," he added.

"While the death penalty continues to be used in India, there remains a danger that it will be used disproportionately against ethnic minorities, the poor or other disadvantaged groups. There is only one way to ensure such inequalities in the administration of justice do not occur: the complete abolition of the death penalty," said Dr. V. Suresh, president, People's Union for Civil Liberties, co-author of the report.

The report has thrown open a fresh debate on abolition of death penalty even as globally, calls are getting louder for its abolition. In December 2007, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voted for a Global Moratorium on Executions and though 104 countries supported it, India voted against the resolution.

"India stands at a crossroads. It can choose to join the global trend towards a moratorium on the death penalty, as adopted by the UN General Assembly last year. It will also then join 27 countries in the Asia Pacific region that have abolished the death penalty in law or in practice," Sharma said.

"Or it can continue to hang death row inmates, when the judicial system that puts them there has been shown by this extensive research to be unfair," he added.

Capital punishment, though existing in India, is rarely used in the country as a deterrent form of punishment. Between 1975 and 1991, about 40 people were executed, though there was a period between 1995 and 2004 when there were no executions. Post--2004, there was only one execution - the death by hanging of a a 41-year-old former security man, Dhananjoy Chatterjee, who was held guilty for raping and killing a 14-year-old schoolgirl in Calcutta, West Bengal.

In India the death penalty is carried out by hanging. An attempt to challenge this method failed in the Supreme Court, which stated in its 1983 judgment that hanging did not involve torture, barbarity, humiliation or degradation.

Under Indian law, the death penalty can be imposed for murder, gang robbery with murder, abetting the suicide of a child or insane person, waging war against the government, and abetting mutiny by a member of the armed forces.

In recent years, however, special courts have also extended the penalty to cases of terrorism under anti-terror legislation.

Of late, some people are also pushing for it to be used against rapists.

In India, the death penalty is imposed in the "rarest of rare" cases, i.e. only particularly gruesome or politically sensitive cases have attracted the penalty.

However, courts in India have interpreted the doctrine of "rarest of rare cases" in different ways, considering the circumstances of each case. This has led to their reaching conflicting conclusions on the need to impose the death penalty, inviting the criticism that they are inconsistent and sometimes illogical and militates against the principles of fairness, justice and due process.

PRACTICE OF DEATH PENALTY AROUND THE WORLD

Till date, 62 countries still maintain the death penalty in both law and practice while 92 countries have abolished it completely.

Among countries around the world, almost all European and many Pacific Area states (including Australia, New Zealand and Timor Leste) and Canada have abolished death penalty. In Latin America, most states have completely abolished the use of death penalty, while some countries, such as Brazil, allow for death penalty only in exceptional situations, such as treason committed during wartime. The United States (the federal government and 36 of its states), Guatemala, most of the Caribbean and the majority of democracies in Asia (e.g. Japan and India) and Africa (e.g. Botswana and Zambia) retain the death penalty. South Africa, which is probably the most developed African nation, and which has been a democracy since 1994, does not have the death penalty. This fact is currently quite controversial in that country, due to the high levels of violent crime, including murder and rape.

The latest countries to abolish the death penalty de facto for all crimes were Gabon, which announced on Sept. 14, 2007 that they would no longer apply capital punishment and South Korea in practice on Dec. 31, 2007 after ten years of disuse. The latest to abolish executions de jure was Uzbekistan on Jan. 1, 2008.