With the crime rate increasing day by day in maniifolds, there is little choice left with the justice courts in India but to award death sentences to set solid examples of intolerence against crimes particularly heinous ones like rape and murder of innocent children and females. A report released by Amnesty internal shows that in 2016 around 175 death sentences were awarded in India as compared to 75 in 2015. These sentences have been awarded for mainly murder related crimes. Though executions of the death sentences allocated in 2016 wasn’t carried out in that year, there were 400 prisoners already in pipeline for execution. India also imposes death penalties on hijacking that involves death of hostages, anyone involved in the offense or security personnel. It is also amongst the few countries to impose death sentences in drug related crimes.
On the other hand Amnesty’s report shows a considerable drop in death sentences across the world and even in our neighboring country Pakistan records 73% decreases in death sentences in 2016 with 360 executions. Amnesty International reported that in total 1032 criminals were executed for various crimes across 23 countries in the world in 2016 against 1634 across 25 countries in 2015. So, again even globally there was a dip in the death sentence imposition. The most number of executions took place in China followed by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan. But, the number of executions carried out China is not know because as per the country’s policy that data is kept secret.
Besides Pakistan, India’s other two neighbors namely Bangladesh and Srilanka executed 245 and 79. The one country that is out of the list of the biggest executioners is USA, which listed 7th in 2016 with only 20 executions, its lowest since 1991.
Having said this, there have been immense efforts for abolishing the law of capital punishments, even though these punishments have been inforce since times unknown. There are many countries in the world which have abolished this law from their justice system as well. This includes the very pioneers namely Michigan, the first to initiate this abolishing followed by Venezuela and Portugal that too ages back in 1867. As on day around 102 countries of the world still practice have completely abolished this punishment while 58 countries still practice it