ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to unravel the knots in the tale of India's lack of executions in the recent past by examining the legal and institutional framework within which capital punishment operates in the Indian judicial and political system, and charting the dramatic decline in capital sentences in India over the decades. The modern' era of the death penalty in India began with its inclusion in the Indian Penal Code (IPC) drafted in the mid-nineteenth century and enacted in 1860 by the British colonial government. The first major reform of the death penalty laws came as part of a series of amendments to criminal law in 1955-56. Since it was first enacted in 1861, until 1956, the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) provided the death penalty as the ordinary punishment for murder. The virtual end of executions between 1997 and 2012 led to some optimism that the Indian death penalty may be on its way out.
