Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka have sentenced most number of persons to death row during 2004-12, the Law Commission has said in its report arguing for abolition of capital punishment.
The Commission studied the rate of imposition of death sentences as a percentage of the rate of convictions for murder for 2004-12 to see the differences in attitude towards the punishment.
It found there was “significant disparity by state” as it studied the figures put out by National Crime Records Bureau between 2004 and 2012.
For example, the report noted, a murder convict in Karnataka is about 3.2 times likely to get the death sentence as a murder convict in the rest of the country put together while it is six times in Delhi and 6.8 times in Jammu and Kashmir.
However, a murder convict in Jharkhand is 2.4 times as likely to get the death sentence compared to the rest of the country while it is 2.5 times for Gujarat and 3 for West Bengal.
The Commission also compares the figures among states and found huge disparity. “A murder convict in Karnataka is 5.8 times as likely to get the death sentence compared to Tamil Nadu,” it said.
A murder convict in Gujarat is again 5.8 times more likely to get the death sentence than one in Rajasthan while Maharashtra sends murder convicts to death row 2.9 times more frequently than Madhya Pradesh.
“Uttar Pradesh sends the most number of persons to the death row, but as a proportion of the conviction rate for murder, it is about par with the national average. Karnataka was the second largest contributor to the death row in this period, and its death sentence rate was 3.2 times the national average,” it added.
Another issue highlighted by the Law Commission was the economic status of the accused who is sentenced to death and their inability to hire quality lawyers to defend them in court.
Government will have to appoint lawyers for the defence in such cases but they are paid “absurdly low” in the range of Rs 500-Rs 1,500 per trial. “The competence of counsel would impact the entire trial and appellate process,” it added.
Quoting data presented by National Law University-Delhi’s Death Penalty Research Project, it said 74 per cent of convicts were economically vulnerable. A large number of them were sole breadwinners, “which would certainly have an impact on whether their families could afford retaining competent counsel”.
(An edited version appeared in Deccan Herald on Sep 3, 2015)
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