In 30 Seconds
Two courtrooms, two very different outcomes, and the same underlying question that Indian criminal law keeps struggling to answer consistently. In Pune, a special court recently sentenced a 65 year old man to death for the rape and murder of a three year old girl, with the judge noting his history of similar offences and calling it a rarest of rare case. Around the same time, the Supreme Court stayed three death sentences from a case in Dakshina Kannada, sending the matter back because the High Court had barely engaged with the question of whether the men deserved a chance at mitigation before being sent to the gallows. Read together, these two moments say a lot about where capital punishment in India actually stands today.
The Legal Middle Ground Between Life And Death
Indian law technically offers judges only two options at sentencing for the most serious crimes, ordinary life imprisonment or death. In practice, ordinary life imprisonment often works out to about fourteen years behind bars once remission is factored in, which has left many trial judges feeling that it understates the gravity of certain crimes. The Supreme Court tried to solve this gap in a 2015 ruling that created a third possibility, a fixed term sentence of twenty, twenty five, thirty years or more without any remission, or a natural life sentence that genuinely means the rest of a person's life. This option exists for High Courts and the Supreme Court to use, but many trial court judges do not have that flexibility, and when they feel life imprisonment is inadequate they sometimes reach for the death penalty instead simply because the middle path is not available to them at that stage.
This gap matters because the numbers around the death penalty in India tell an uncomfortable story. Sessions courts handed down 128 death sentences in 2025 alone, and 1,310 since 2016. Yet High Courts confirmed only about eight percent of the cases sent to them for confirmation. The Supreme Court has not confirmed a single death sentence in the past three years, and in 2025 it acquitted ten death row prisoners, the highest number in a decade. People sentenced to death by trial courts often wait more than five years before an appellate court either overturns the conviction or commutes the sentence, and some have waited nearly a decade before being cleared entirely.
Why So Many Death Sentences Get Overturned
The Supreme Court's own rulings, particularly in a 2022 case called Manoj versus State of Madhya Pradesh, require that before a judge sentences someone to death there must be a proper hearing that looks at psychological evaluations, the person's conduct in custody, and any circumstances that might argue for a lesser punishment. This is known as the mitigation inquiry. Reports suggest that nearly ninety five percent of death sentences handed down in 2025 skipped these safeguards, with sentencing often happening within days of conviction, leaving almost no time for a proper defence to be built around mitigating circumstances. That gap between what the law requires and what actually happens in courtrooms explains why so many death sentences collapse on appeal.
There is also a slow but visible shift underway toward using long fixed term sentences, sometimes stretching to sixty years, as an alternative to execution. Supporters see this as a sensible middle path that punishes severely without risking an irreversible error. Critics worry it simply removes any real possibility of rehabilitation while dodging the moral debate around state execution altogether.
What This Means Going Forward
For ordinary readers, the practical takeaway is that a death sentence reported in the news is rarely the final word. It usually marks the start of a long legal process running through the High Court, the Supreme Court, review petitions, curative petitions and finally a mercy petition to the President or Governor, any of which can end in commutation. The Pune case will likely follow the same road that the Dakshina Kannada case is now on, years of appeals during which the sentence can, and often does, change.
A Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court is currently expected to settle uniform guidelines for how trial courts should conduct these mitigation hearings, which could finally close the gap between the letter of the law and how it is applied on the ground. Until that happens, India's death penalty system will likely keep producing headlines about executions that, statistically, are unlikely to ever actually take place.
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Official context: Readers can compare this story with public information from National Crime Records Bureau.
