Over 1,200 persons given death sentence in 10 years: Study

Sessions courts in India handed death penalties to 1,279 persons between 2016 and 2025, a study by criminal reforms advocacy group The Square Circle Clinic showed on Wednesday.

The persons were given 1,310 death penalties, which meant that multiple death sentences may have been imposed on the same person over the years.

In only 70 cases the sentence was confirmed by High Courts, a number that the advocacy group described as “staggeringly low”.

The study added that by the end of the last year, 574 persons were on death row in India, the highest since 2016 when the number stood at 400.

In 2025 alone, sessions courts sentenced 128 persons to death in 94 cases. In the same year, while High Courts overturned death sentences into acquittals in more than 25% of the matters they decided, the Supreme Court acquitted the accused in more than half of the cases it heard.

It added that for the third consecutive year, the Supreme Court did not confirm any death sentences.

“The low rates of confirmation over the past 10 years reflects the appellate judiciary’s concerns with the system’s failure to adhere to due process guarantees and coincides with the Supreme Court’s increased scrutiny of due process safeguards at the sentencing stage,” the study said.

It added that “wrongful or erroneous or unjustified convictions” could not be dismissed as “random or freak incidents”.

The president rejected 19 mercy petitions and accepted 5 between 2016 and 2025.

The study added that 312 cases involving 478 persons were pending before the High Courts as of December 31. The average duration of pendency between a person being sentenced to death by a sessions court and heard by a High Court was 2.99 years, or nearly 36 months.

The Jammu and Kashmir High Court, on an average, had the longest pendency duration of 11.53 years, or more than 138 months.

The Allahabad High Court had the highest number of death penalty cases (91) pending at the end of 2025, the study said.

The study also highlighted the growing use of life imprisonment without remission as a “worryingly unregulated area of law that is in need of a framework to save it from the arbitrariness that currently plagues it”.

It warned that while there had been a decline in the use of the death penalty by higher courts, this emerging alternative should not be viewed as a safer or lenient alternative.

It noted that such a sentence takes “away from a person an important essence of life – hope”.

A 2015 Law Commission report had recommended abolition of the death penalty, except in terrorism-related offences and waging war, and it had hoped that India would move towards absolute abolition of the death penalty.

But India continues to be one of the 55 countries that retain the death penalty for ordinary crimes, according to Amnesty International’s 2023 data.

Also read:

• Why SC thinks courts humanely evaluating the accused could reduce rush to award death penalty
• Arbitrary death sentencing is the rule not the exception in Indian courts