Abstract
Due to the death penalty sentencing framework’s requirement of taking into account the context of the individual accused who is to be punished, the Supreme Court of India has characterised death penalty sentencing as socio-legal in nature. In this paper, we consider the tensions that have emerged when the legal is forced to interact with the social—when death penalty sentencing law, legal practice, and process has to account for perspectives from the social sciences. One of the mechanisms through which the law conducts this socio-legal examination at the stage of sentencing is mitigation. Mitigation is an exercise by the defence of collecting and analysing information on behalf of the accused to help courts decide the question of punishment. Mitigation borrows from the social sciences in constructing the individual for the law. We present our own experience of establishing a mitigation practice in death penalty cases in India and trace concerns that are revealed when social science disciplines engage with the law. In doing so, we borrow from the social sciences to etch out the contours of the core of the death penalty sentencing framework—culpability at sentencing and reformation—and reflect on the conflict which ensues. We conclude that while the struggle of this interdisciplinarity at the sentencing stage may be good, it may also mean that the search for complete accuracy in sentencing might be misplaced while raising important questions about the meaning of “consistency” in sentencing.
Custom Citation
Anup Surendranath and Maitreyi Misra, 'The Meaning and Challenges of an Interdisciplinary Sentencing Exercise: Reflections from a Death Penalty Mitigation Practice' (2024) 20(2) Socio-Legal Review 52.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
doi.org/10.55496/HRPM2892
