Beyond the Current Discourse: Addressing the Judicial Question of Death Penalty in India

Abstract

It is observed that whenever a heinous crime happens, the public outcry for the death penalty is very vocal in the social realm of India. Though there are several discussions around this, from de-institutionalism to judicial questions, a sociological analysis of the public response is identified as a research gap by the author. In light of this, the research attempts to analyse the public response to the discourse of capital punishment in India. This paper refers to two important cases in the history of the Indian judiciary to define the principles of the 'rarest of the rare' and circumstantial crime. This is primarily an attempt to provide an easy narrative to understand why the Indian judiciary still does not avoid sentencing the death penalty to the convicts. This short article uses certain important cases and some popular theories from an ethnocentric viewpoint in making the sociological analysis.