Statistics of death penalty as SC set to hear review plea of Nirbhaya case convict

The Supreme Court will on Tuesday hear a plea filed by one of the four convicts in the Nirbhaya gangrape-cum-murder case seeking a review of the 2017 apex court judgment upholding his death penalty in the matter. A bench of Chief Justice S.A. Bobde and Justices R. Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan would hear the review plea filed by Akshay Kumar Singh whose lawyer has sought clemency arguing life in Delhi is anyway becoming short due to rising air and water pollution. The bench would also hear the counsel appearing for the victim's mother who has moved the top court opposing the plea.

"The state must not simply execute people to prove that it is attacking terror or violence against women. It must persistently work towards systematic reforms to bring about change. Executions only kill the criminal, not the crime...," Akshay Kumar Singh's review plea, filed through advocate A.P. Singh, said. The plea referred to the moral reasons for abolition of the death penalty and said there was no evidence to show that such a punishment has got a deterrent value.

On July 9 last year, the apex court had dismissed the review pleas filed by the other three convicts—Mukesh (30), Pawan Gupta (23) and Vinay Sharma (24)—in the case, saying no grounds have been made out by them for review of the 2017 verdict. The 23-year-old paramedic student was gangraped and brutally assaulted on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012 inside a moving bus in south Delhi by six persons before being thrown out on the road. She died on December 29, 2012 at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.  One of the accused in the case, Ram Singh, allegedly committed suicide in the Tihar Jail. A juvenile, who was among the accused, was convicted by a juvenile justice board and was released from a reformation home after serving a three-year term.

The top court in its 2017 verdict had upheld the capital punishment awarded to them by the Delhi High Court and the trial court in the case.

Death penalty in India

Parliament had last year expanded the scope of death penalty by introducing it in cases of rape of girls below 12 years under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO). As per Project 39A report on death penalty, released by National Law University, Delhi, between 2000 and 2014, trial courts sentenced 1,810 people to death, more than half of which were commuted to life imprisonment and about a quarter of those, 443, were acquitted by the Supreme Court and high courts. The Supreme Court had upheld the death sentence of 73 of these prisoners, out of which many had already spent a decade on death row.

The apex court last year commuted 11 death sentences to life imprisonment, while confirming them in three cases in the review plea hearing of the December 16 Delhi gang-rape case.  The SC had confirmed seven death punishments in 2017 whereas in 2016 it had confirmed capital punishment in one case and commuted seven death penalties.

The 50 countries that still allow death penalty include India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, the US, Iran, Japan, Kuwait, Bangladesh, Iraq, Indonesia and the UAE, according to information in public domain. The US-based Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit organization, states that there are 146 countries that have totally abolished it in law and practice. India executes criminals only in extreme cases and only 26 executions have taken place in India since 1991, the last being 1993 bomb blast case convict Yakub Memon in 2015. Before that, India had executed 2001 Indian Parliament attack Afzal Guru.

However, the trial courts in India sentenced 162 persons to the gallows in 2018, which was the highest in nearly two decades, since 2000. Out of these, 45 included cases for murder and 58 for murder involving sexual offences. The high courts of the country had confirmed 23 death sentences in 2018 whereas they commuted 58 of them and remitted 10 cases. The year saw acquittal in 23 cases in high courts. As per its data on death penalty, as many as 720 prisoners have been executed in India since 1947. 

One of the initial executions of independent India, was of Nathuram Godse and Narain D. Apte, assassins of Mahatma Gandhi; they were hanged to death in Ambala Central Jail in Haryana on November 15, 1949. The crimes punishable with death term in India fall under The Prevention of Child Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) 2012, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967, Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) 1999, Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) 1985, among others.

In 2018, with 22 cases of capital punishment, over four times more compared to 2017, Madhya Pradesh topped the list of states giving death penalty. With 16 convicts being sentenced to capital punishment, Maharahstra was second in the list, closely followed by Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh with 15 cases each of death sentences. According to Cornell Centre on the Death Penalty Worldwide, the last execution that had taken place in India was on July 30, 2015 of Yakub Memon, a convict in financing 1993 Mumbai bombings. Prior to Memon, Muhammad Afzal Guru, who was convicted in the 2001 Parliament attack was sentenced to death by the Supreme Court on December 18, 2002. The special court had sentenced Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab, the 2008 Mumbai attack gunman, to death on May 6, 2010 and he was executed two years later on November 21, 2012 after the then President Pranab Mukherjee rejected his mercy petition. The top court had confirmed the sentence on August 29, 2012.

-Inputs from PTI