India has a poor record of convicting those accused of sexually abusing children – around 28 percent were convicted in 2016.
It is unbelievable, that in a country it could happen that children of 4 years old are raped, and that often this passes unpennalised.
In a 2008 study, Amnesty International called for a moratorium on the death penalty, citing the risks it poses to marginalised communities.
A few years ago, New Delhi-based research group Project 39A
examined death penalties handed out between 2000 and 2015 and found
that less than five percent were upheld in the Supreme Court and almost
30 percent of death row prisoners were eventually acquitted.
Supreme Court judge Madan B Lokur claimed
in 2016 that death row prisoners often failed to get quality
representation, saying:
“Legal aid in India is nothing but a joke.”
Kumar, the director-general of prosecution in Madhya Pradesh, however, said the speed of sentencing was a sign of efficiency.
“You might say that [conviction in] five days is fast but we had given all possible evidences,”
he told Al
Jazeera.
In 2018 twenty-one defendants were accused of sexually assaulting minors. Under pressure of the Western world India now tries to bring penalties very soon. Today for such case can be given a death penalties and this penalty can even be given within three days, seven days, 11 days and one month.“The high court has already confirmed [death sentences in] seven cases. Three to four cases were commuted to life imprisonment. But it never said the trials conducted were faulty.”
By the end of 2018, 426 prisoners were on death row.
Critics are worried over the rising use of the death penalty.
“If you look at the statistical data, most of those on the death row are extremely poor, with very little or no education and belong to India’s most marginalised groups,”
said
Ankita Sarkar, associate litigator at Project 39A, a New Delhi-based
research group.
“The quality of legal representation that prisoners of death row receive is very often abysmal. These extremely short trials make for a terrible quality of justice especially in a system where fabrication of evidence and suppression of exculpatory evidence is rampant."
“India’s stand to retain the death penalty when the world is moving to abolish it thus ends up perpetuating a lot of prejudices and biases,”
she added.
According to several of these individuals, the eagerness to dispense justice was a result of media clamour, legal reforms and a systemic push for the maximum punishment – often at the cost of due process.“States like Madhya Pradesh, in this context, starts to look like the Texas of India.”
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