India
Foreign Nationals and the Death Penalty
Death Penalty Overview
The death penalty in India stems from the
colonial Indian Penal Code of 1860, which
lists capital offences as including murder,
aggravated rape, sexual offences against
children, drug traf cking and crimes against
the state, such as espionage and terrorism.
The only permissible method of execution is
by hanging.
Project 39A, a research and litigation unit at
the National Law University, Delhi’s Death
Penalty India Report (2016), the rst major
empirical work on capital punishment in
India, mapped the socio-economic pro le of
prisoners sentenced to death and found that
nearly 75% of prisoners on death row belong
to marginalised and vulnerable backgrounds,
who are often unable to navigate the legal
system and do not have the resources to
access quality legal representation.
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The debate around the death penalty in
India, particularly in the context of sexual
offences and terror offences, has intensi ed
in the recent past. In 2015, the Law
Commission of India, after undertaking a
thorough analysis of capital sentencing
jurisprudence since the Bachan Singh case
(1980), recommended the abolition of the
death penalty except for terror offences,
which was considered politically expedient.
However, despite this call for abolition, since
2015, the scope of the death penalty in India
has widened.
In March 2019, four men convicted of the
internationally condemned gang rape and
murder of a young woman in Delhi in 2012,
were executed. This marked the rst hanging
for a sexual offence in India since 1996. Since
the Delhi rape case, India has introduced
tougher laws to deal with sexual violence
against women and children. Across the
political spectrum, political leaders have
expressed support for the death penalty for
sexual violence, in a bid to ‘protect’ women.
The increasing use of death sentences for
sexual offences has been documented by
Project 39A, who found that between 2016
and 2020, the proportion of capital cases