Matters of Judgment

Process

Matters of Judgment is an opinion study on the criminal justice system and the death penalty with 60 former judges of the Supreme Court of India. The 60 former judges adjudicated 208 death penalty cases between them at different points during the period 1975-2016. We carried out in-depth, semi structured interviews with former judges with a questionnaire that guided the interviewers.

‍

• The questionnaire was broadly divided into three themes which included, investigation and trial processes, sentencing in death penalty cases, and judicial attitudes towards the death penalty
• Besides the questionnaire, three hypothetical cases were also used as a tool during interviews. Each hypothetical case consisted of relevant evidence on record for a capital offence committed, and a few sentencing factors. The former judges were asked to decide these cases by determining guilt, and sentencing the accused
• For a significant number of judges, the ‘rarest of the rare’ was based on categories or description of offences alone and had little to do with judicial test requiring that the alternative of life imprisonment be ‘unquestionably foreclosed’
• Deterrence emerged as the strongest penological justification for retaining the death penalty with 23 former judges seeing merit in that argument. However, most of them believed that the deterrent value of the death penalty flows from a general fear of punishment rather than any particular deterrent value specific to the death penalty