New Delhi: India’s death penalty jurisprudence requires courts to examine not just the crime, but the individual convicted—including their background, mental health and potential for reformation. With an increasing number of death sentences pronounced by trial courts and none upheld by the Supreme Court since 2023, lawyers who have studied capital cases say trial courts often fail to engage meaningfully with these mitigating factors.
At least 574 people were on death row at the end of 2025. The gap between sentencing and appellate scrutiny raises urgent questions about how capital punishment is administered.
Last week, a court in Meerut sentenced Muskan Rastogi (26) and Sahil Shukla (28) to death for conspiring and murdering Rastogi’s husband Saurabh Rajput, in what came to be infamous as the ‘blue drum’ case. The 2025 murder had drawn nationwide attention as Rajput’s body was dismembered and encased in a plastic drum with cement; the trial was completed in just 13 months.
On 17 October 2026, a special fast-track court in Mysuru, Karnataka, awarded the death penalty to 32-year-old Karthik, convicted under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act for the brutal sexual assault and murder of a nine-year-old girl in 2025. The court designated it a “rarest of rare” case, highlighting the extreme cruelty which included 27 stab wounds.
On 16 October, in a separate case in Meerut, Amardeep and Ravita were sentenced to death for murdering the latter’s husband, Amit Kashyap, by strangling him and attempting to pass off the death as snakebite using a defanged, non-poisonous reptile. Additional District and Sessions Judge Jaiveer Singh Nagar cited the Manusmriti, saying “fear of punishment keeps society under control”.
Muzaffarnagar judge Ravi Kumar Diwakar has been in the news for awarding death sentences to 22 convicts in 10 cases over just four months this year. Last month, while awarding capital punishment in another case, he declared that he would rather die than act out of fear of criminal networks or international terror threats. “I would prefer to die, rather than be called a coward judge,” his order in Hindi read.
In India, the law requires the high court and then the Supreme Court to confirm a death sentence after a trial court awards it. Historically, that has been on the decline. Of the 70 trial court death sentences confirmed by high courts between 2016 and 2025, the Supreme Court adjudicated 37 death sentences. Of these 37 high court-confirmed death sentences, 14 (37.83 per cent) were commuted to life imprisonment by the Supreme Court. Some 15 sentences (40.54 per cent) resulted in total acquittals from the death sentence. No sentence was confirmed or upheld by the Supreme Court.
In 2025 itself, the Supreme Court decided 19 capital cases and commuted the death sentences of five persons across five cases—all five of which had previously been confirmed by high courts. All of these 2025 commutations were converted into ‘Life Without Remission’ (LWOR), specifically life imprisonment excluding remission for the remainder of natural life.
India has not carried out an execution since March 2020, when four men convicted in the 2012 Delhi gang-rape case were executed. The Supreme Court has not confirmed any death sentences from 2023 till date, raising questions over the reliability of the sentencing process.
In 2022, the Supreme Court said in the landmark Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh judgement that capital sentencing must consider the individual accused, not just the crime. It directed courts to obtain material on mitigating circumstances, including family and socioeconomic background, psychological and psychiatric conditions, and prison conduct.
A 2025 judgement in the Vasanta Sampat Dupare v. Union of India & Ors. case saw the top court examining the significance of psychiatric and psychological evaluations, intellectual disability, mental illness and the absence of appropriate assistance during the sentencing process.
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The face of remorse?
Senjuti Chakrabarti, a Calcutta-based trial court lawyer who has represented accused persons in death-eligible cases says the periodic use of death penalty by trial courts raises questions about how simplistically judges often evaluate a convict’s possibility for reformation, basing it on subjective perceptions of how remorse should look like, along with unreasoned dismissal of strong mitigating factors and drawing from the myth of the collective conscience, more often making such decisions purely judge-centric.
To substantiate this, Chakrabarti points to the drastic difference between the reasonings of trial courts behind imposing death penalty in the last five years post Supreme Court’s guidelines in Manoj and that of the Calcutta High Court subsequently commuting them.
For instance, she says, the weight trial courts placed on a convict’s courtroom demeanour during the trial while gaging remorse and their potential for reformation risks turning a complex assessment of a person’s capacity for future change into a subjective judgment on certain physicality, drawing from a colonial idea of discipline.
On the other hand, the high court has dismissed these observations simply stating how the state, which has the responsibility to prove that the possibility reformation is foreclosed, failed to reach that threshold evidentiarily.
Having previously worked in the state’s legal aid services, she says that in the West Bengal cases she has examined, the state often submits documents such as probation reports, prison-conduct reports and mental-health assessments merely as a compliance, without any meaningful analysis of what they reveal about the convict.
“Here is where the striking gap between the inherent demand of the death penalty jurisprudence from stakeholders to apply inter-disciplinary tools in approaching sentencing, and yet the dearth of any training, becomes glaring,” she says.
Such lack of training becomes evident in, as Chakrabarti identifies, another recurring problem in Bengal: perceiving mitigating circumstances as attempts by the accused to seek sympathy, rather than as evidence that must be independently assessed. She argues that the purpose of mitigation is not to determine whether a judge feels sympathy for the accused. Rather, death penalty sentencing aims to understand the criminal beyond the crime, to ensure a reasoned assessment of the circumstances behind the act.
Moreover, Chakrabarti also expresses concern on the fundamental requirement of the Indian death penalty jurisprudence to weigh aggravating and mitigating circumstances alongside possibility of reformation. She argues that this exercise of pitching mitigating factors around the crime and the aggravating factors of the crime is perhaps a paradox since no person’s life will be devoid of any mitigating factors. And this again brings back the very judge-centric sentencing process that the Supreme Court otherwise aims to discourage—what may be mitigating for one judge often turns aggravating for the other.
She also raises a deeper question about the role of public in capital sentencing, particularly in sensationalised cases. She argues that the concept of “collective conscience” that often features in Indian death penalty jurisprudence is a mythical phrase, impossible to define objectively. In her view, judges must distinguish between instant public reactions to a crime and the legal principles governing the sentence.
Senior advocate Rishi Malhotra, who has spent nearly 30 years practising criminal law, believes that the growing imposition of death sentences by trial courts reflects a failure to adequately apply the Supreme Court’s evolving jurisprudence on capital punishment. He argues that the gravity of an offence, however disturbing, cannot substitute for a careful assessment of mitigating circumstances and the possibility of reformation.
Malhotra explains that the state bears responsibility for presenting evidence that a prisoner is incapable of reformation, given that the prisoner remains in its custody. If the state fails to establish that proposition, he argued, the benefit should go to the accused when the court determines whether the death penalty is warranted.
Malhotra is particularly critical of what he described as trial courts allowing public sentiment and the brutality of an offence to influence capital sentencing decisions. Referring to the recent ‘Blue Drum’ murder case, he said that “the trial court is actually swayed away with the emotion of the case”.
He also points out how imposing death sentences in cases where higher courts are unlikely to uphold them creates additional litigation. A trial-court death sentence must be referred to the high court for confirmation, alongside the proceedings arising from the convicted person’s appeal. If a trial court instead imposes an appropriate sentence of life imprisonment, Malhotra argues, unnecessary confirmation proceedings in cases that do not meet the capital threshold could be avoided.
Malhotra also identifies media coverage as a potential source of pressure on the criminal justice system, particularly at the trial-court level. “Being a criminal lawyer for us for 30 years now, I sincerely believe that any case where the media jumps in is devastating for an accused person,” he says. For Malhotra, these cases illustrate why courts must maintain the distinction between public perception and proof beyond reasonable doubt.
“The media plays a bit of a devil’s role,” he says, describing its potential influence on trial courts and public opinion.
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What data shows
India’s death row population reached a record high of 574 prisoners at the end of 2025—the highest year-end total since 2016.
According to The Square Circle Clinic’s 2026 report ‘Death Penalty in India: Annual Statistics 2025’, trial courts (sessions courts) across the country continue to sentence defendants to death at a steady rate. In 2025 alone, sessions courts imposed death sentences on 128 persons in 94 cases. Over the 10-year period from 2016 to 2025, trial courts issued 1,310 death sentences involving 1,279 individuals across 822 cases.
Despite this, over the entire 2016–2025 decade, only four executions took place in India—all in 2020 following the final rejection of mercy and curative petitions in a single case.
As of December 31, 2025, 312 cases involving 478 prisoners were pending confirmation before High Courts, with an average pendency of 2.99 years and maximum delays reaching up to 19.11 years.
At the apex court, 18.2 percent of pending capital cases have been languishing for over 10 years, and another 21.2 percent have been pending between seven and 10 years. Of 1,310 death sentences awarded by trial courts between 2016 and 2025, 468 cases remain pending at the high court stage alone.
The report stated that over the 2016-2025 decade, high courts acquitted 285 persons (33.84 percent) and commuted 411 sentences (48.81 percent). In 2025, the Supreme Court acquitted defendants in over 50 percent of the capital cases it decided (10 out of 19 cases).
According to the Square Circle Clinic’s decade-long analysis, published in 2026, high courts confirmed only 106 of the 1,085 death sentences they decided between 2016 and 2025—approximately 9.8 percent.
Speaking to ThePrint, Maitreyi Misra, Director, Research, at the Square Circle Clinic points out how the Supreme Court’s acquittal decisions in 2025 repeatedly “found inadmissible confessions as part of the record, serious lacunae in the collection of evidence, unreliable witnesses, concocted testimonies, problems in the prosecution’s construction of the case, as well as an ‘overzealous’ approach of the courts as recurrent problems in the criminal justice system”.
She highlights that the court had noted concerns not only with investigation agencies and prosecution, but also with the approach of courts in ensuring convictions, regardless of whether the evidence adds up.
She notes a serious systemic concern about the sentencing process at the trial court level. Of all sessions court death sentences that reached the Supreme Court through high court confirmation, the Supreme Court upheld none, she says.
After Vasanta Sampat Dupare (2025), sentencing hearings that do not comply with the Manoj guidelines are now violative of fundamental rights. Misra notes how, given that sessions courts are not complying, the constitutional status of the vast majority of death sentences currently on record is in “serious question”.
“For instance, our data shows that in 2025, in only one (five accused) of the five cases that were confirmed by the high courts, did the court comply with Manoj,” she adds.
Raising concerns at the sentencing stage, Misra says, “If trial courts were genuinely applying the ‘rarest of rare’ standards, the appellate correction rate would not look like this.”
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)
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