Trial courts handed 128 death sentences in 2025, highest female convictions since 2016, says report

Decadal findings by Square Circle Clinic show that an overwhelming majority of death sentences imposed by trial courts did not withstand scrutiny at higher judicial levels.

File illustration: Soham Sen | ThePrint

New Delhi: In 2025, sessions courts sentenced 10 women to death—the highest number of female death penalty convictions recorded since 2016. On the other hand, 118 men were handed capital punishment, according to the the Square Circle Clinic’s (formerly Project 39A) ‘The Death Penalty in India: Annual Statistics Report’.

All the 10 women were convicted for murder. While four of them are from Uttar Pradesh, two are from Kerala. The remaining four are from Bihar, Karnataka, Haryana and Telangana. Of the total 128 cases, six were related to the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO).

“The proportion of trial court death sentences being set aside by appellate courts through acquittals and commutations is staggering. The Supreme Court’s acquittals from death row is a further indication of the crisis afflicting the death penalty in India,” Anup Surendranath, Professor of Law & Executive Director, The Square Circle Clinic at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, told ThePrint.

“Given these realities, it really must make us question the wisdom of persisting with the death penalty in India.”

When it came to the nature of offences in the last 10 years, the maximum cases were of simple murder, followed by murder with sexual offences, non-homicidal child rape and dacoity with murder.

The report also adds that the fewest number of death penalties were handed out the year that the COVID-19 pandemic hit, that is in 2020. Putting these findings in a larger perspective, 2022 saw the maximum number of persons (166) sentenced to death by sessions courts, followed by 161 in 2021.

Since 2016, sessions courts have imposed 1,310 death sentences on 1,279 persons in a total of 822 cases.

Multiple death sentences, the report says, may have been imposed on the same person across multiple years. “In such instances, the same person is counted as a distinct unit across different years,” it explains, adding that as a result, the total number of persons, that is 1,310, is only notional and does not correspond to the actual number of persons given the death penalty.

Apart from this, the 113-page report also delves into aspects like data on mercy petitions, commutations, acquittals, disposal and pendency in HCs, and persons sentenced to death across different states.

The President rejected 19 mercy petitions by death-row convicts and accepted only five in the last 10 years, the report mentions, adding that four of them were executed in 2020.

In the past one year, the Rashtrapati Bhavan rejected the mercy plea of death row convict Ravi Ashok Ghumare. By a 2:1 verdict in October 2019, the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty given to him by the Bombay HC for raping and murdering a two-year-old girl in Maharashtra in 2012.

Wrongful convictions

In the last one year, the Supreme Court acquitted those accused in over 50 percent of the cases involving heinous offences like murder, murder with sexual offences. However, in the last decade, “364 persons who should not even have been convicted unjustifiably suffered the pains of death row,” the report says.

“Wrongful or erroneous or unjustified convictions, then, are not random or freak accidents in the Indian criminal justice system. They have been, the data indicates, a persistent and serious systemic concern,” it says, pointing out that 364 persons were wrongly convicted in 10 years.

These concerns also speak to serious lapses of action and omission by the investigation and prosecution agencies.

In September last year, three persons acquitted by the Supreme Court had filed a plea seeking compensation from the state for their wrongful conviction. They argued that they were deprived of their right to life and liberty without due process and their wrongful convictions impinged on their fundamental rights under Article 21 (right to life) of the Constitution.

High rate of acquittals

In the past ten years, 1,279 individuals were handed the harshest punishment in the Indian criminal justice system, i.e.,  the death penalty.

The findings pointed out that 2025 is the third year in a row that the Supreme Court did not confirm a single death sentence. The year also saw the most acquittals since 2016, with 10 persons being acquitted by the top court, out of the total 153 death sentences that it adjudicated, the report adds.

Out of the total 153 death penalty cases, there were acquittals in 26 cases (when data from all courts is combined) out of which the highest number of acquittals, that is, 56.76 percent were in cases where the accused of murder along with sexual offences, followed by 29.72 percent for simple murder, it adds.

Putting these decade-long findings in a larger context, the report reveals that the acquittal rate of High Courts was four times their confirmation rates, in death penalty cases. On the other hand, the acquittal rates were twice the confirmation rates at the apex court.

When it came to the states, no death sentences were imposed in Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Sikkim, Manipur, Odisha, Nagaland, Himachal Pradesh and Tripura. On the other hand, some states like Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka and Haryana had the highest proportions of death penalty being handed out to convicts.

“In the past decade, the High Courts which saw the highest proportion of their death penalty confirmations reversed by the Supreme Court leading to an acquittal were: Uttarakhand High Court (20 percent), Allahabad High Court (13 percent), Punjab & Haryana High Court (10 percent), Madras High Court (10 percent) and Bombay High Court (8.33 percent),” the report mentions.

Significantly, the report mentioned that while collecting data, the researchers faced problems like language barriers, and the unavailability of POCSO judgments, especially at the lower levels.

“Often, we have found ourselves faced with a data deficit because judgements are not always available publicly. For instance, states non-uniformly follow different rules with respect to making judgements available in cases under the POCSO Act.

“As a result, with respect to states which do not make judgments under the POCSO Act publicly available, little information regarding the case is available with which we can compute data for our purpose,” the report says, adding that most of the times, the researchers had to wait until the judgement was made available or the HC  judgement is uploaded, at the confirmation stage, for the requisite details.

It also mentions that during the task of data collection, it faced similar barriers with language, leading to situations where the researchers had to wait for data entry and English transitions of the order to analyse them. Sometimes “data is simply not available” or is available belatedly, it adds.

(Edited by Tony Rai)