By Jayshree Bajoria
On his 54th birthday, Yakub Memon took the last, loneliest walk of his life – to the hangman’s noose. Memon was executed for his involvement in a series of bombings in Mumbai in 1993 that killed 257 people and injured more than 700 others.
His looming execution sparked a debate in India over the merits of his sentence and more broadly India’s decision to retain the death penalty even as nearly two-thirds of countries around the world have abandoned this cruel, inhumane, and degrading form of punishment either in law or in practice.
So, why does India cling to capital punishment? Perhaps the government is afraid to be seen as soft in the face of horrific terrorist attacks or other crimes like the 2013 gang rape of a student in New Delhi. But the often professed goals for capital punishment – deterrence, reformation, or justice – hardly hold up to scrutiny. There is no conclusive evidence from India to show that the death penalty acts as a deterrent. According to the Working Group on Human Rights, the murder rate has declined consistently in India over the last 20 years despite the slowdown in the execution of death sentences since 1980. A recent study in India shows capital punishment is applied disproportionately to the poor and marginalized.
Capital punishment should also be rejected on the simple grounds it is irreversible. In India, several judges in 2012, called for commutation of 13 death sentences saying they were erroneously upheld by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, in a binding judgment in Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab in 1980 laid down that the death penalty could only be granted in the “rarest of rare” cases but evidence from court rulings in the last three decades show that the principle has failed. Plus, these death sentences are meted out by a criminal justice system known to be abusive, under-resourced, and in urgent need of reform.
Memon’s case highlights another fundamental flaw. One of the mitigating factors laid down in the Bachan Singh judgement was the probability that the accused could be reformed and rehabilitated – a factor not considered in Memon’s case. India lacks any credible process to assess whether an accused is capable of reform. More importantly, most Indian prisons lack adequate or effective systems to help the reformation or rehabilitation of prisoners. Those on death row are treated even worse.
India has rightly restrained the use of capital punishment, hanging three men since 2004 compared to scores that have been executed in the United States, China, or Saudi Arabia. But hundreds remain on death row, wondering about their fate, something that the Supreme Court agrees is a form of torture. Yakub Memon spent more than two decades in prison before he was hanged this morning.
It is definitely time for India to change. A saying famously attributed to Gandhi is: “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” India should adopt his message, and end the use of the death penalty for retribution.
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Jayshree Bajoria is a researcher with the Human Rights Watch.