With 561 prisoners on death row at the end of 2023, India’s death row population has continued to rise to reach its highest-ever numbers since 2004. In an unprecedented trend, the Supreme Court of India acquitted nearly 55% of the death row prisoners (six prisoners) in the cases it heard in 2023. This development must be understood alongside the Court initiative (in September 2022) to convene a Constitution Bench to reform death penalty sentencing. However, given the continued evidence of the broken state of sentencing in India’s courts, the potential of this Bench to truly turn things around appears uncertain. Instead, the high rate of acquittals with a skyrocketing death row population must compel the Court to consider whether India’s death penalty reform can ever be limited to the question of sentencing.
More commutations and acquittals
Data from Project 39A’s 2023 annual statistics on the death penalty show that the Court’s attempts to reform sentencing through its directions in Manoj vs The State Of Madhya Pradesh (May 2022) have failed to trickle down to trial courts for the second year in a row. In 2023, trial courts imposed 86.96% of death sentences in the absence of information pertaining to the accused that was mandated in Manoj.
