Capital punishment in India

Capital punishment is a legal penalty in India. It has been carried out in 5 instances since 1995, while a total of 26 executions have taken place in India since 1991.

The Supreme Court in Mithu vs. State of Punjab struck down Section 303 of the Indian Penal Code, which provided for a mandatory death sentence for offenders serving a life sentence. The number of people executed in India since independence in 1947 is a matter of dispute; official government statistics claim that only 52 people had been executed since independence. However, research by the People's Union for Civil Liberties indicates that the actual number of executions is in fact much higher, as they located records of 1,422 executions in the decade from 1953 to 1963 alone. A research by National Law University, Delhi on death row convicts since 2000 has found that of the 1,617 prisoners sentenced to death by trial courts in India, the capital punishment was confirmed in only 71 cases. NLU Delhi confirmed 755 executions in India since 1947.National Law University, Delhi examined 1,414 prisoners who were executed, in the available list of convicts hanged in post-Independence since 1947. According to a report of the Law Commission of India (1967), the total number of cases in which the sentence of death in India was executed from 1953 to 1963 was 1,410.

In December 2007, India voted against a United Nations General Assembly resolution calling for a moratorium on the death penalty. In November 2012, India again upheld its stance on capital punishment by voting against the UN General Assembly draft resolution seeking to ban death penalty.

On 31 August 2015, the Law Commission of India submitted a report to the government which recommended the abolition of capital punishment for all crimes in India, excepting the crime of waging war against the nation or for terrorism-related offences. The report cited several factors to justify abolishing the death penalty, including its abolition by 140 other nations, its arbitrary and flawed application and its lack of any proven deterring effect on criminals.

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