The Capital Punishment: An Analytical Study of the Indian Death Penalty and its’ International Counterparts

  • R. Arthi
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  • R. Arthi

    Student at SASTRA Deemed University, India

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Abstract

No person should be condemned unheard. The chances that a person might be innocent after being accused at the outset are the reason the Indian system of punishment is tolerant. The death penalty is awarded in India in the rarest of rare cases. A life that is lost once cannot be retrieved back. Even in rare cases, the process of awarding capital punishment has remedies along its way. From the proceedings in trial courts to appeals in the High Courts with jurisdiction, then the Supreme Court of India, and finally the President’s pardon- the death warrant is not awarded unless it is unquestionable that the accused deserves the sentence. While India values justice, the situation can be compared to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom- both on opposite ends of the scale. In a recent incident, Saudi Arabia ordered the mass execution of 81 people for various crimes. These included being part of anti-government protests and charges such as “allegiance to foreign terrorist organizations”. It is known as the largest mass execution in the kingdom in its neoteric history. On the other hand, the United Kingdom has abolished the death penalty entirely by Article 13, Protocol 1 of the Human Rights Act. The crime rate for Saudi Arabia in 2017 was 1.27, which was a 14.49% decline from 2015. The crime rate in the United Kingdom was 79.52 per 1,000 people in 2021–2022. The overall UK crime rate saw a 1.18% increase from 2020. This paper traces the death penalty's history and crime rates of all three and compares the same effect. It also looks into the international conventions and changes introduced. The ultimate question asked is - Which is better: To mitigate the loss of the death penalty or to avoid it?

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Research Paper

Information

International Journal of Law Management and Humanities, Volume 5, Issue 5, Page 1379 - 1394

DOI: https://doij.org/10.10000/IJLMH.113706

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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution -NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits remixing, adapting, and building upon the work for non-commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited.

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