Retain, Restrict or Abolish: Understanding Death Penalty Support and Opposition among Legal Professionals in India

Abstract

Most research on death penalty attitudes has surveyed members of the public or university students, and much of it comes from the United States. Far less is known about the people who actually work the capital system: the lawyers who prosecute and defend capital cases and the judges who decide them. This article asks how legal professionals in India view the death penalty, and which reasons for supporting or opposing it appear most often in what they say and do. It uses a qualitative documentary and secondary-analysis design. A purposive corpus of 14 publicly available sources published between 2008 and 2025 was analysed: the Law Commission of India's 262nd Report, an interview study of 60 former Supreme Court judges, a published survey that included 107 practising lawyers, the national Death Penalty India Report, five annual sentencing reports, the Justice Verma Committee report, earlier student surveys, and contemporary reports of collective positions taken by bar associations. Each source was coded against ten reason themes drawn from the attitude literature: law and order, cost, retribution, deterrence and incapacitation on the support side, and brutalisation, innocence, morality, emotional opposition and unfair application on the opposition side. The analysis suggests that Indian legal professionals largely favour keeping the death penalty, mainly for reasons of deterrence and retribution, while many also accept that the system that imposes it is affected by wrongful convictions, custodial torture, poor legal aid and class and caste bias. This awareness rarely turns into support for abolition. The article calls this gap "retention with reservations" and argues that it helps explain why India hands down well over a hundred death sentences a year yet has carried out only a handful of executions since 2004. Directions for a primary survey of Indian advocates are proposed.