The Square Circle Clinic, NALSAR

While there has been a global move away from the death penalty, India has seen a consistent expansion of death-eligible offences.  A significant part of our work is providing pro bono legal representation to death row prisoners, including mitigation investigations. We have represented 169 persons on death row (including ongoing cases) resulting in 28 acquittals and 51 commutations. Our team for defence of death row prisoners is an interdisciplinary one comprising criminal law practitioners, forensic experts, legal researchers, social workers, psychologists and anthropologists. Our strategic litigation on the death penalty has also resulted in important developments in death penalty jurisprudence.

Besides litigation, we have generated extensive research on various facets of the administration of the death penalty in India. Our research on  the socio-economic profile, lived experience and mental health status of death row prisoners in India has received both domestic and global recognition. We have also analysed capital sentencing trends in India’s trial courts and the Supreme Court and produced an opinion study on the death penalty with former Supreme Court judges. Since 2016, we have rigorously documented and released annual statistics on the use of the death penalty in India. Our annual statistics on the death penalty is considered to be the most authoritative resource on the issue as far as India is concerned.

Critical engagement with the quality of forensic evidence in criminal law cases along with institutional engagement on forensics in India is integral to our work. With a clear commitment to reliable forensic evidence, the effort through our individual criminal cases is to ensure that unreliable forensic evidence is not used for convictions. Our work on forensics also looks at the regulatory framework governing the functioning of forensic labs along with issues of infrastructure, personnel, and budgets confronting the forensic labs in India.

Through consistent efforts before the Supreme Court to raise concerns about the protocols of forensic labs and quality of forensic evidence, we have played a significant role in the law developing through judgments like Rahul & Ors. v. NCT of Delhi. Increasingly we have been part of efforts where the Supreme Court has sent cases back to the trial court for re-examination of forensic experts and we have taken up those trials, including conducting technical and scientific cross-examination of forensic experts.

In 2023, our team published a comprehensive study, Forensic Science India Report: A Study of the Forensic Science Laboratories (2013 – 2017), that laid out the myriad challenges forensic science laboratories in the country experience and provided substantial recommendations for strengthening forensic science. Our forensics team is also invited to judicial academies and forensic universities to deliver trainings for judges, forensic scientists, lawyers, and students.

Issues of mental health intersect with the criminal justice system in multiple ways. The competence to stand trial, the insanity defence, implications of intellectual disability, mental health considerations in sentencing and during incarceration, access to mental health services are vital aspects of criminal justice. Yet these aspects are thoroughly misunderstood and misapplied while often being driven by prejudice. It is yet another instance where the law has to interact and depend on interdisciplinary insights – and this has posed a challenge to both persons of the law and mental health related professionals.  Our work aims to bridge the gap between criminal law, the criminal justice system, and developments in mental health related fields. We work towards institutionalising a rights based approach to mental health in the Indian criminal justice system.

Our defining work in this area has been Deathworthy: A Mental Health Perspective on the Death Penalty, a report based on extensive research with over 100 death row prisoners across five states in India. Starting with our collaboration with psychiatrists at NIMHANS (India’s leading mental health hospital) for Deathworthy, our case work interventions and policy work has seen us collaborate with leading forensic psychiatrists and mental health professionals in different parts of India and the world. Our work in this area has been recognised through the Presidential Commendation at the 23^rd World Congress of the World Psychiatric Association, and also the Calcutta High Court accepting our intervention to assess the mental health status of incarcerated persons in West Bengal.

Over 70% of India’s prison population comprise undertrials and nearly 75% of those undertrials belong to economically and socially vulnerable groups. In addition to the high proportion of criminalisation and arrest, persons from socio-economically marginalised communities are also more likely to be disproportionately impacted at each stage in the criminal justice process, often being trapped in a cycle of arrests and releases. Prison overcrowding, extremely long periods of undertrial incarceration, and discrimination of vulnerable groups in the criminal justice system are vulnerabilities being addressed through our work in the Fair Trial programme. The programme works in collaboration with the Government of Maharashtra and state legal aid bodies in Pune and Nagpur to provide effective and holistic criminal defence to undertrials. Comprising a team of in-house lawyers and social workers, the Fair Trial programme undertakes cases in the district and taluka courts of Nagpur and Pune.

Our effort is to uphold the presumption of innocence and fair trial rights by providing quality legal aid in a timely fashion to undertrials. Since its inception in January 2019, the programme has resulted in the release of nearly 1700 individuals. The programme has also demonstrated a model of mainstreaming the role of social workers in criminal defence borrowing from the frameworks of ‘holistic defence’ and ‘anti-carceral social work’. Finally, our intervention has led to the operationalisation of Prison Legal Aid Clinics in Yerwada Central Prison (Pune) towards increasing the access and utilisation of state legal aid. Through the programme, we published Prisons, Courts and Legal Aid (2021), and, in collaboration with Prayas, we released Legal Representation for Undertrials in Maharashtra (2023).

India has yet to ratify the UN Convention Against Torture that it is a signatory to. There is also no comprehensive national legislative framework concerning custodial violence. Our work has made us well aware of the pervasive presence of torture within the Indian criminal justice system. Through Magistrates and Constitutional Protections (2024), our ethnographic study of magistrate courts in all districts of Delhi, our team members’ research has provided insights into how touch points built to check against custodial violence, like medical examination and first production before a Magistrate, have routinely failed. Retired Supreme Court judges in our opinion study Matters of Judgment too have acknowledged custodial violence as a frequent tool deployed by the police in criminal investigations. Our efforts have also been in the direction of developing in-depth longform reporting to map the challenges in pursuing accountability in custodial death cases.

Research has shown that arts programmes have “a wide range of benefits” for prisoners and, among other aspects, allows them to “re-define their identity”. Our Art in Prisons (AIP) initiative in Puzhal Central Prison (Chennai) in collaboration with Sumanasa Foundation enables access to art practices to incarcerated persons. The project creates a safe space for incarcerated people to express and build their artistic ability by gaining opportunities to practice arts ranging from pottery and fine arts, a variety of musical genres, to collective theatre performance. Art in Prisons enables the right to artistic expression by creating a space for incarcerated participants to engage with art on their own terms. This initiative is motivated by the belief that all persons are entitled to access art and express themselves through art. 

Since its launch in 2023 in Puzhal Central Prison, a group of 22 art practitioners have worked as facilitators with 35 incarcerated students. Together, they created an ‘Art Block’ in Puzhal Central Prison to allow the incarcerated students to access art practices throughout the initiative’s duration. The pilot programme concluded in October 2024 with a showcase featuring artwork, pottery, performances, and more created collectively by facilitators and students. The programme began its second cycle of implementation in June 2025.  

Moving the needle on issues in the criminal justice system is just as much a task of shifting public discourse as it is pushing for evidence-based policy-making and critical thinking.  Our team has been committed to creative and innovative ways of making criminal justice conversations accessible to wider audiences. We aim to present the perspectives and stories we encounter in our work  through artistic performances, audio-visual materials, books and zines for non-legal audiences, exhibitions, public events, and social media engagement. Given the sharp nature of criminal justice conversations, we are committed to developing forms of engagement that will allow us as a society to pause and reflect on some of our most divisive issues.

At The Square Circle Clinic, our work aims to engage with broader, foundational questions about the criminal justice system. We are interested in how societies decide what should be criminalized, the extent of criminalization, and the relationship between formal laws and their actual enforcement.

Our focus includes the decisions courts make between available punishments, and extends beyond to larger concerns such as proportionality, social and political motivations behind punishment, and discretionary exercise of power by criminal justice actors. We examine how structures of criminal law shape who is punished, what is punished, and why certain harms are criminalised while others remain under-enforced or unenforced. This approach allows us to explore systemic and philosophical questions about crime and punishment. It reflects our commitment to thinking critically about the principles that underlie criminalisation and the ways in which punishment is administered and justified.

Wrongful convictions are a deeply concerning yet barely documented reality within the Indian criminal justice system. Wrongful convictions remain an under-explored area of scholarship and policy reform. Despite judicial acknowledgements of wrongful convictions in individual cases, there is little sustained engagement with it as a systemic issue.  Various levels of the judiciary have recognised investigative and prosecutorial misconduct, manipulation of evidence, use of torture but yet a conversation on wrongful convictions has been a non-starter. Besides, there is much reluctance from courts to grant compensation even in  cases where the acquittals have come with explicit recognition of manipulation and malafide.  

At The Square Circle Clinic, we aim to address this critical gap by building sustained thought, research, and public discourse on wrongful convictions in India. Through our work, we seek to question systemic failures, advocate for stronger safeguards, and build a robust body of knowledge that centres the lived experiences of those who have been wrongfully convicted.

Across the world and in India, there is a growing reliance on science and technology to address the complex challenges of criminal justice. From forensic evidence and biometric databases to the use of artificial intelligence in policing and sentencing, science and technology are increasingly seen as tools that can bring objectivity, efficiency, and neutrality to the system. Through our work, we aim to approach this intersection with a critical lens where the use of science and technology is tempered by scientific validity, fairness, and due process. Our work seeks to examine how science and technology shape, influence, and sometimes complicate the administration of criminal justice. 

We recognize the global and national momentum to integrate scientific methods and technological solutions into policing, investigation, adjudication, and punishment, but we also interrogate the assumptions of infallibility and neutrality that often accompany these developments. This  new area of our work seeks to map and understand the growing intersections between science, technology, and criminal justice in India. Through rigorous research and public storytelling, we aim to build accessible narratives that unpack how these tools are used, whose interests they serve, and what new ethical, legal, and social questions they raise.