Capital punishment in India

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Capital punishment is legal in India although rarely used. Between 1975 and 1991, about 40 people were executed, though there was a period between 1995 and 2004 when there were no executions. Therefore India has the lowest execution rate amongst retentionist countries.

In August 2004, a 41-year-old former security man, Dhananjoy Chatterjee, was executed for raping and killing a 14-year-old schoolgirl in Calcutta. This was the country's first execution since 1995^[1] and the first execution in West Bengal since 1993 when Kartik Sil and Sukumar Burman were hanged.^[2]

The death penalty is to be used in the "rarest of rare" cases according to a law passed by the Supreme Court of India, although the meaning of this phrase is not clearly defined. Capital punishment can be imposed for murder, instigating a child's suicide, treason, acts of terrorism, or a second conviction for drug trafficking. A judge can refuse to award the death sentence even in "rarest of the rare" cases by providing reasons for doing so.

About 40 mercy petitions are pending before the president, some of them from 1992. At least 3 are women. Many more are on death row after having been sentenced to die by lower courts, but on appeal most of them are likely to be commuted to life imprisonment by the State High Courts or the Supreme Court of India.

It appears that judges in the lower courts are also getting increasingly averse to use the capital punishment. For example in 2007 several high profile cases involving pre-meditated cold blooded murders, rape and murder of minors during rioting, terrorist bombings, etc. have not attracted the death penalty. But activists reveal a flaw, that due to the absence of sentencing guidelines in what constitutes "rarest of the rare", in some less gruesome murders, the lower courts have awarded death sentences possibly due to poor defence presented by the lawyers of the economically backward.

The death penalty is carried out by hanging. After a 1983 challenge to this method, the Supreme Court ruled that hanging did not involve torture, barbarity, humiliation or degradation.

A major controversy exists as to whether or not to execute Mohammad Afzal, a Kashmiri terrorist who was convicted of masterminding the attack on the Indian parliament building. His death sentence was upheld by the Indian Supreme Court in 2006 on the grounds that the attack "shocked the conscience of the society at large". But the central government has so far not disposed of his mercy petition providing an emotive issue to the opposition parties.

According to the government, a total of 55 people (all men) have been executed in India since independence in 1947. Activists are seeking to use the Right to Information Act to get an exact figure but some government officials have admitted that they don't have exact records.