New Delhi (EFE) Posted this Monday.
“With 165 death sentences at the end of 2022, this is the highest number of death sentences imposed in one year in more than two decades (since 2000),” reads this 77-page document released by the research center. Project39A”, specialized in criminal justice and part of the New Delhi Law University.
The report also noted that just over half of death sentences were related to sexual violence in 2022, a consistent trend over the past five years in India.
Death sentences for 38 of the 49 involved in a series of attacks in India
This figure, higher than the 146 convictions recorded in 2021, is largely due to the death penalty that a special court ordered last February for 38 of the 49 involved in a series of attacks in the city of Ahmedabad, which caused some 55 fatalities and some 200 injured in July 2008.
This was the largest number of people sentenced to death in a single trial since 2016, while the other defendants were sentenced to life in prison.
Those convicted in this case became one of the 539 people who were waiting on death row at the end of 2022, the highest number reported since 2016, the first year the report was published.
This is 49 more people than were on death row compared to 2021, and an increase of 40% compared to 2015.
The increase in these data is due to “the large number of death sentences imposed by trial courts and the consequent low rate of resolution of death penalty cases by appellate courts,” the report explains.
In this sense, the document criticized that the courts of first instance imposed death sentences in 98.3% of cases “without taking into account any material on the extenuating circumstances of the defendant.”
A lack of habitual information that worried the Supreme Court at the beginning of last year and that led its judges to examine the practices of these courts to reform the procedures of action
