ANNUAL DEATH PENALTY REPORT, 2022
The National Law University was established under the NLUA Act of 2007. Project 39A is a group associated with the university and it recently released a report called the Annual Death Penalty Report, 2022. According to the report, the number of death penalty prisoners in India increased to 539 in 2022. It was 490 in 2021.
Key Findings of the report
• 3% of death rows were judged by trial courts. SC pronounced 11 death penalty judgments and High Courts in the country pronounced 68 death sentences
• Appellate courts pronounced the least number of death sentences
• Of all the crimes, sexual violence received the maximum death penalty. Almost one–third of the capital punishments were for sexual violence
• In Gujarat, 51 people were sentenced to death by the Sessions court
• UP Sessions Court: 32
• Jharkhand sessions court: 17
• No death sentences were pronounced in the courts of J&K, Delhi, Telangana, and Manipur
• Two out of every 165 death sentences were pronounced on women
• India has 539 death-sentenced prisoners as of 2022. This is a 40% increase as compared to the numbers in 2015
• UP had the highest death sentences followed by Gujarat and Jharkhand.
TRIVIA:
National Law Universities (NLU) are public law schools in India, founded pursuant to the second-generation reforms for legal education sought to be implemented by the Bar Council of India. The first NLU was the National Law School of India University aka NLS/NLU Bangalore which admitted its first batch in 1988. Since then, most of the states in India have NLUs. Currently there are 26 NLUs across the country out of which 1 is an off-center campus of NLU Gandhinagar which is named as (GNLU SILVASSA Campus). Since the inception of NLUs, these law schools have continuously been ranked as India’s most prestigious and premier law schools by various agencies and are also referred as IITs of Legal Education.