Abstract:
While hearing appeals from prisoners sentenced to death, the Supreme Court in the recent past
has started permitting ‘mitigation investigations’. This process of ‘mitigation investigations’ by
the defense involves reconstructing the entire life history of the person sentenced to death.
From that reconstruction, information relevant to determination of punishment has to be put
before the court.
In this talk we highlight the tensions and convergences that we have encountered in this area
through our work defending prisoners sentenced to death over the last decade. In conducting
mitigation investigations, a member of the defence team (often a criminologist, social worker,
sociologist, or a psychologist) puts on an investigator’s hat to unearth life stories and lifeworlds
of people sentenced to death. The law is interested in the life of the individual in the hope that
it will aid courts in determining the individual’s moral culpability/degree of responsibility for the
offence as well as their potential to reform. Subsequently, courts try to map that determination
on to a quantifiable punishment (including whether a death sentence is justified). While social
sciences might help answer philosophical questions regarding individual responsibility and
redemption, there is an inherent tension in the law’s need for certainty of punishment as a life
and liberty concern, and the heavily context dependent answers that social sciences produce
about an individual. We attempt to trace this interdisciplinary struggle in death penalty
sentencing processes and outcomes to ideas (in the law and the social sciences) that are not
necessarily in conflict but have led to a precarious scaffolding for death penalty jurisprudence.
Biodata:
●Anup Surendranath is Professor of Law at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad and the
Executive Director of The Square Circle Clinic, a criminal justice initiative at NALSAR.
● Maitreyi Misra has been involved in representing capital defendants for the past 10 years.
She currently holds the position of Director, Death Penalty Mitigation at The Square Circle
Clinic, NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.