Interview by Ann Ninan/IPS - Amnesty International and People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL), an Indian rights watchdog, believe there could be between 3,000 and 4,000 today.

Their recent joint study — a scrutiny of some 700 Supreme Court judgements over the last 56 years — concludes the death penalty in India is a "lethal lottery". "The line between lack of information and secrecy is rather thin," says its main author, Bikram Jeet Batra, a lawyer and researcher, in an interview with IPS correspondent Ann Ninan.

Figures of the number of people sentenced to death or on death row are fuzzy in India. Is this indicative of secrecy or a general lack of information?

Secrecy in India is not of the same nature as, say, in China where information on the death penalty is a state secret. But it does appear that there is some effort to withhold information on the death penalty. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) gives details of the number of persons sentenced to death and executed since 1995 in their annual "Prison Statistics", but claims to have no such information before that.

Since 1953, the very same NCRB has been publishing the "Crime in India" series with statistics on most offences. What this means is that while we can easily know the number of persons charged for forgery and those convicted for robbery in any of the years since 1953, we have no information on how many people were executed.

The line between lack of information and secrecy is rather thin.

Do you think innocent people may have been sentenced to death?

Of the 700-odd cases we studied for the Amnesty-PUCL report (The Death Penalty in India – A Lethal Lottery), in well over 100 cases people were acquitted by the Supreme Court after at least one of the lower courts had sentenced them to death. This leaves no doubt that innocent persons are sentenced to death.

Perhaps the most well-known case of an innocent person being hanged is Kehar Singh (in 1989) in the Indira Gandhi assassination case. Although it is still not officially accepted as an error, even many judges have agreed that the evidence in that case was shockingly insufficient and that an innocent man was hanged.

Is torture endemic in India and how does the Supreme Court react to allegations?

Torture is, in practice, an integral part of police interrogations. Unfortunately the judicial system does not take claims of torture very seriously. Even in cases where there is strong evidence of torture, the courts have turned a blind eye to it.

Although confessions are not admissible in courts anymore, there is a huge loophole: "discoveries" made by the police on the basis of "voluntary" information given by the accused are admissible evidence. For example, the police conveniently place weapons or other evidence at a certain location and "discover" these on the basis of a fabricated statement allegedly made by the accused. The courts are willing to accept the police testimony as "disinterested" or neutral, despite many well-documented instances that the police are not neutral — particularly in cases where the bogey of national security and terrorism are raised.

Are many people being sentenced to death sometimes without adequate defence — or even no legal defence?

Given how little legal-aid lawyers are paid, the bottom line is that most good and successful lawyers are unlikely to take up many legal-aid cases. That leaves usually the young and inexperienced or the unsuccessful lawyers taking up these cases. There are of course honourable exceptions, particularly in the Supreme Court. But most accused who are poor will invariably get inadequate legal defence in the trial court.

It is at the trial stage where all the evidence is required to be challenged. If this is not done properly, it is not easy for the evidence to be overturned in an appeal before the high court and the Supreme Court. While Afzal Guru’s case (sentenced to death for the attack on Indian parliament in 2001) is well-known, the Amnesty-PUCL report refers to many cases of poor legal defence, including one where the accused were tricked into signing away their own land by their lawyer in the high court. There is no doubt that the conflict of interest may have played a vital role in the rejection of their appeal. The three men in this case were subsequently hanged.

Have children been sentenced to death?

In a number of cases there is strong reason to believe that juveniles were sentenced to death as the courts wrongly came to the conclusion that they were above 18 at the time of the offence. In fact, there is reason to believe that one of the accused presently on death row in the state of Uttar Pradesh was a juvenile at the time of the murder. His mercy petition is presently pending before the president of India after the courts rejected various petitions on his behalf, despite some of the judges themselves expressing concern of his youth.

Is there hope of abolition of the death penalty?

I think it is important to recognise the global move away from the death penalty. Despite what a small handful of nations say, there is no doubt that the absence of the death penalty from the International Criminal Court (set up in 2002 to prosecute the gravest cases of genocide and crimes against humanity) is a clear indicator of world opinion.

Last year the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for a global moratorium against the death penalty. India’s vote against the resolution is an unfortunate result of short-sighted thinking. The Indian government (both the present and previous) has already shown that it is not keen to execute too many persons — we have had only one execution since 1999. Supporting a call for a U.N.-led moratorium would be the obvious step forward — along with setting up an inter-disciplinary commission to look into the question of abolition of the death penalty.