NEW DELHI: Out of every 100 death sentences that trial courts pronounce, less than five are upheld by higher courts. About 30% of the remaining prisoners are acquitted, and the sentence is commuted for the rest.
What happens to all the people trapped in the maws of criminal justice system, condemned to death? No ministry or agency has a record of how many people India has executed since Independence. Data is scarce, and the stories are unheard.
The Death Penalty Project, launched by the National Law University, Delhi, is the first to look closely at life under the death sentence. Between July 2013 and January 2015, it compiled official data and interviewed hundreds of death row prisoners and their families.
"The narratives we heard were extremely unsettling," says Anup Surendranath, constitutional law professor at NLUD who headed the project.
"I feel like I am caught between two blades of a scissor, with no means to escape," says Harikrishnan, one of the death row prisoners interviewed.
The project looks at the vagaries of the criminal justice system, the state of prisons, and the brutalizing of the police as an institution where torture of prisoners and threats against families are routine to draw out confessions.
But what stands out is how the long wait to hear whether they will live or die can devastate prisoners. This uncertainty, says Surendranath, "is unmatched in any other form of incarceration".
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