The death penalty is a deeply polarising topic in India. People who justify and oppose it hold deeply held often emotional reasons for their vie​​ws. Most of Europe has abolished the death penalty but India does not seem to be considering such a move. In fact in recent years the clamour for capital punishment epecially for rapists has only grown louder. At the end of 2021 when this episode was recorded, the numer of prisoners on death row stood at 488, the highest in 17 years, according to the Death Penalty in India Report.

On Episode 6 we spoke to Dr Anup Surendranath who is the Executive Director of Project 39A (formerly the Centre on the Death Penalty) and an Assistant Professor of Law at National Law University, Delhi.  His involvement with the death penalty our topic for today began in May 2013 by establishing and leading the Death Penalty Research Project that culminated in the Death Penalty India Report ​that was released in​ 2016. The project, first of its kind on the death penalty in India, interviewed all of India's death row prisoners and their families towards developing a socio-economic profile of death row prisoners and also mapping their interaction with the criminal justice system. Today Anup joins us to help us unpack and understand how capital punishment plays out in India.

Reading List

1. Anup Surendranath,, Neetika Vishwanath, and Preeti Pratishruti Dash. "The Enduring Gaps and Errors in Capital Sentencing in India." Nat'l L. Sch. India Rev. 32 (2020), 46.
2. Craig Haney,  Death by design: Capital punishment as a social psychological system. Oxford University Press, 2005.
3. Craig Haney, Criminality in context: The psychological foundations of criminal justice reform. American Psychological Association, 2020.
4. Jahnavi Misra, The Punished: Stories of Death-Row Prisoners in India, 2021Harper Collins
5. Probal Chaudhuri, Debasis Sengupta and Paramesh Goswami, Adalat, Media, Samaj Ebong Dhananjoyer Phasi 2016.
6. Project 39A, Death Penalty India Report, 2016 https://www.project39a.com/dpir

CREDITS:

Host: Leah Verghese

This is a Maed in India production.

Production Head & Editor: Joshua Thomas

Sound Mixing: Kartik Kulkarni

Project Supervisor: Shaun Fanthome