Law & Justice · September 2026
23 Death Sentences in 5 Months.
A single sessions judge in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh sentenced 23 people to death in approximately five months. The Supreme Court has very clear rules about how death sentences must be imposed. Less than 4% of trial court death sentences since 2022 follow those rules. This is not a small procedural problem. It is a constitutional crisis hiding in courtrooms.
A death sentence is the most irreversible act a court can perform. It ends a life. Once carried out, no appellate judgment can undo it. For this reason, the Supreme Court of India has built, over decades, a careful architecture of procedural safeguards — specific requirements that a court must satisfy before it condemns a person to death. These are not suggestions. They are binding law.
Between approximately February and July 2026, the Additional District and Sessions Judge (ADJ) in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh handed down death sentences to 23 people across nine separate judgments. The sentences were imposed in roughly five months.
Researchers at NALSAR University of Law examined those nine judgments carefully. What they found should concern every person who believes that the law means what it says — regardless of their views on capital punishment.
What the Supreme Court Requires Before a Death Sentence
To understand what went wrong in Muzaffarnagar, you first need to understand what the law requires. Indian law on the death penalty has evolved through a series of landmark Supreme Court judgments that have progressively made the process more rigorous and individualised.
What Is the “Rarest of Rare” Doctrine?
The Legal Standard That Governs Every Death Sentence in India
In 1980, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court decided the case of Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab. This is the foundational death penalty judgment in Indian law. The court held that the death penalty should be imposed only in the “rarest of rare” cases — meaning it should be exceptional, not routine.
More importantly, the court laid down a two-part test that must be applied every time a court considers imposing death:
1. The nature of the crime — How brutal, heinous, or shocking was the offence? This is the aggravating side of the balance.
2. The circumstances of the accused — Who is this person? What is their background, mental state, social history, possibility of reform? This is the mitigating side.
The court was explicit: a judge cannot impose death just because a crime was horrific. They must also examine the person who committed it and determine whether life imprisonment would be “unquestionably foreclosed” — meaning there is no possibility of reform or redemption. This individualised assessment is not optional. It is constitutionally required.
For decades after Bachan Singh, there was a gap between the law’s requirement and courtroom practice. Mitigation — the investigation of an accused person’s background, mental health, and social circumstances — was often reduced to the judge asking the accused at sentencing whether they had “anything to say.” The accused usually said nothing meaningful. The judge moved on. Bachan Singh’s requirement of individualised assessment became, in practice, a formality.
Manoj v. State of MP (2022): The Game-Changing Judgment
In May 2022, the Supreme Court issued a landmark judgment in Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh that tried to fix the gap between the Bachan Singh standard and actual practice. The court laid down a detailed, mandatory procedural framework that every trial court must follow before imposing death.
The Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh Framework — What a Court Must Do Before Imposing Death
The Supreme Court held in Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh that “meaningful consideration of mitigating circumstances” requires the court to have actual documentary material before it. This means the following reports must be sought and examined:
- Probation officer’s report — assessing the accused’s social background, family circumstances, community context
- Prison authority’s report — on the accused’s conduct and behaviour while in custody
- Psychological and psychiatric assessment — evaluating mental health, any history of trauma, cognitive functioning
- Mitigation report from the defence — a detailed report on the accused’s socio-economic history, childhood, education, employment, relationships, and personal background
The purpose of these reports is to allow the court to genuinely assess: who is this person, what formed them, can they reform, and does the death penalty serve any purpose that life imprisonment would not? Asking the accused “do you have anything to say?” in court does not fulfil this requirement.
What Is Mitigation?
Why a Person’s Background Matters in Sentencing
“Mitigation” in criminal law refers to facts about a person or their circumstances that do not excuse or justify the crime but reduce the severity of the punishment that is appropriate. Mitigating factors might include: a history of abuse or trauma, extreme poverty, a mental illness, youth, lack of prior criminal history, remorse, or evidence of strong possibility of reform.
Mitigation is not about feeling sorry for a murderer. It is about answering the constitutional question: is this person so irredeemably dangerous and so incapable of reform that society is justified in ending their life?
That question cannot be answered by looking only at what the person did. It requires looking at who they are — and that requires investigation, documentation, and evidence. The Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh judgment mandated that this investigation must actually happen before any death sentence is pronounced.
Then, in August 2025, the Supreme Court reinforced the Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh framework in Vasanta Sampat Dupare v. Union of India. The court held explicitly that imposing a death sentence without following the safeguards mandated in Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh would be a violation of the accused’s fundamental rights — not merely a procedural irregularity, but a constitutional violation.
What the Muzaffarnagar Judgments Actually Show
Against this legal background, researchers examined the nine Muzaffarnagar death sentence judgments. Their findings are striking — not because the trial judge ignored Supreme Court precedents, but because he cited them extensively while ignoring what they actually require.
The judgments repeatedly cite the same set of Supreme Court cases — including Bachan Singh — in much the same sequence, often using the same excerpts. The citations are there. The reasoning is not.
When the judgments come to the actual decision — should this person be sentenced to death or to life imprisonment — the reasoning rests almost entirely on the nature and circumstances of the crime. The crimes are described in detail. Their brutality is documented. The offences are characterised as heinous. Death is imposed.
What is absent from the judgments is any indication that the Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh framework was followed. There is no evidence that probation reports, prison authority reports, psychological assessments, or mitigation reports were obtained or considered. There is no individualised examination of who the accused persons are — their backgrounds, mental states, histories, or possibilities of reform. The law as laid down by Bachan Singh and reinforced by Manoj was, in the key moment, simply not applied.
The National Picture: Only 4% Compliance
The Muzaffarnagar cases are troubling. The national data is alarming.
The National Compliance Picture — NALSAR Data
- Research period: 2023 to 2025 (after the May 2022 Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh judgment)
- Total trial court death sentences analysed: 216 cases
- Cases that complied with Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh requirements: 8 cases
- Compliance rate: less than 4%
- Cases not following mandatory Supreme Court procedure: more than 96%
Source: The Square Circle Clinic, NALSAR University of Law
Read that again. After the Supreme Court issued a detailed, specific, mandatory framework for how death sentences must be imposed — a framework it later elevated to the status of a fundamental right requirement — over 96 percent of trial courts that imposed death sentences in the following three years simply did not follow it.
This is not a few judges making isolated errors. This is a near-total systemic failure to implement a binding Supreme Court precedent in the highest-stakes legal context that exists. It raises profound questions about how India’s trial courts understand their relationship to Supreme Court authority.
What Happens to These 23 People Now?
Under Indian law, every death sentence imposed by a trial court must be confirmed by the relevant High Court before it can be carried out. This is called the “confirmation” process. The High Court reviews the case afresh — it examines both the conviction and the sentence independently, and it has the power to uphold, modify, or set aside the death sentence.
What Is Appellate Review of Death Sentences?
Why a Trial Court Death Sentence Is Not the Final Word
In India, a person sentenced to death does not go to the gallows on the basis of the trial court’s verdict alone. The law requires multiple layers of judicial review:
- High Court confirmation: Every death sentence is automatically referred to the High Court for confirmation. The High Court reviews the trial court’s judgment and must independently satisfy itself that the death sentence is warranted.
- Appeal to the Supreme Court: The accused (and the state) can further appeal to the Supreme Court.
- Mercy petition: Even after the Supreme Court, a condemned person can file a mercy petition with the Governor of the State and then the President of India.
This multi-layered process reflects the principle that the irreversibility of death demands an exceptional degree of care at every stage.
Virtually none of the 23 Muzaffarnagar death sentences will ultimately be upheld, precisely because they do not comply with the Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh framework. The Allahabad High Court will review them, find the Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh requirements unmet, and will be obliged to reject the sentences as constitutionally invalid.
But this will take years. The 23 people condemned in those Muzaffarnagar courtrooms will spend those years under the shadow of a death sentence that was almost certainly going to be overturned from the moment it was imposed. They will wait. Their families will wait. The legal process will grind on.
The Bigger Problem: What These Cases Reveal About the System
The Muzaffarnagar judgments, and the NALSAR data behind them, point to three distinct but interconnected failures.
First: A failure of legal training. If more than 96 percent of death sentence judgments are non-compliant with a four-year-old Supreme Court precedent, something has failed in how that precedent is being communicated to and absorbed by trial courts. The Manoj judgment is not obscure or difficult — it is one of the most discussed Supreme Court rulings of recent years. Trial judges who impose death sentences should know it and apply it. That most apparently do not suggests a systemic gap in judicial training and oversight.
Second: A conflation of crime and criminal. The temptation in severe cases is obvious. A crime has been committed that shocks the conscience. A judge who lets the horror of the crime dominate the sentencing reasoning is, in human terms, understandable. But it is legally wrong. The Bachan Singh standard exists precisely because the severity of a crime is not, by itself, sufficient justification for killing the person who committed it. A judge who sentences on the basis of crime severity alone — however egregious the crime — is not applying the law. They are substituting their moral reaction for it.
Third: A confusion about what judicial independence means. Judicial independence cannot and does not mean judicial freedom from the law. A trial court judge has independence from external political or personal pressure. They do not have independence from binding Supreme Court precedent. The law laid down in Bachan Singh, Manoj, and Dupare is not optional. It is not something a trial judge can decide to weigh against their own philosophy of punishment. It is binding.
It means not the courage to impose a death sentence when a crime is horrible — that, in fact, requires very little courage, because the public and the judge’s own instinct may support it. The real courage is in following the law even when it demands more from you, even when it complicates the obvious response, even when it requires you to look at the person who committed the crime and not just at what they did.
Twenty-three people in Muzaffarnagar are currently under death sentences that were almost certainly imposed in violation of the Constitution. They will probably not be executed. But they will wait, for years, for the appellate process to confirm what the law already says. That is not justice. That is a legal system failing to keep its own house in order.