Trails courts in India have awarded 165 death penalties in 2022, which is the highest in the past two decades. A total of 539 people is on death row by the end of December 2022. This number has increased from 404 in December 2020 to 539 in 2022.
Project 39A, an advisory group associated with National Law University, Delhi, submitted the Annual Statistics Report 2022. Surprisingly, out of 165 death penalty impositions, one-third of the cases are registered with sexual violence.
In one case, an Ahmedabad sessions court sentenced 38 persons to death for their involvement in a series of attacks in Ahmedabad in 2008. Since 2016, this is the largest number of persons sentenced to death in a single case.
According to the Annual statistics report 2022, Gujarat stands first in the state-wise distribution of death sentences imposed by sessions courts with 51 cases. This was followed by UP with 32 death sentences and Jharkhand with 17 death sentences.
Moreover, states like Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur and Telangana didn’t register a single death sentence in 2022.
Persons on Death Row (past 5 years observation)
- 2018- 426 persons
- 2019- 378 persons
- 2020- 404 persons
- 2021- 490 persons
- 2022- 539 persons
International Developments:
A total of 113 countries abolished the death penalty in 2022. At the United Nations General Assembly on 15 December 2022, 125 nations voted in favour of a moratorium on the death sentence, with India voting against the same.
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