LADY Justice is depicted as blindfolded, but is she blind and without any bias? Not always. A recent empirical study of convicts on death row confirms the fact that the capital punishment in India is reserved for the poor and the marginalised. While the poor get gallows, the rich mostly escape. According to a study, three-fourths of those given death penalty in the past one-and-a-half decades belonged to the backward classes and religious minorities. And "as many as 93.5 percent of those sentenced to death for terror offences are dalits or religious minorities", The Times of India reports. The report of the first-of-its-kind study, which has been jointly conducted by National Law University researchers and the National Legal Services Authority and which will soon be published, raises some disturbing questions over the capital punishment at a time when the debate over its abolition is grabbing the headlines in the wake of Yakub Memon case. The CPI(M) has opposed the death sentence given to Yakub Memon as it “alone will not serve the interests of justice”. “The CPI(M) has been in principle advocating the abolition of the death penalty. Hence, Yakub Memon’s mercy petition, which has been filed, should be accepted,” the Polit Bureau said in a statement on July 22. The study findings, based on interviews of about 400 people awarded death sentence over a 15-year period, their family members, relatives and lawyers, reflects the reality of how our criminal justice system is skewed against the poor and the marginalised. An overwhelming majority of the 477 prisoners on death row happen to be dalits, tribals and Muslims and OBCs, according to a report in Outlook magazine. Not just that, there is a near-complete absence of direct evidence in most cases and in over 80 percent of cases, the conviction was based on confessions of the accused extracted through torture. “…clearly an overwhelming majority of the convicts on death row are from backward castes, dalits and minorities… And of course virtually all of them are poor. We knew it intuitively but for the first time in this country we have crunching numbers and actual case studies to show the reality on the ground,” Anup Surendranath, professor at National Law University, Delhi, and head of Death Penalty Research Project, told Outlook magazine. It does not end here. Muslims, dalits and adivasis constitute 38.8 percent of the population but 53 percent of the under-trial prisoners (1.48 lakh out of 2.78 lakh). “India’s systemic reality is that the criminal justice system works differently for different people. The police behaves very differently in its dealings with a lower caste person as opposed to the village pradhan or a richer person. And it is not just our police, our entire criminal justice system faces a tremendous crisis and factors like class, caste and religion operate to further victimise the already marginalised sections… For example, in Bihar in one case, upper caste men were arrested for the massacre of dalits and in another case dalits were arrested for the massacre of upper castes. Both cases were dealt with very differently. Dalits were tried and sentenced to death under TADA but not the upper castes, who were tried for offences under the Indian Penal Code. For similar offences with similar kind of evidence, the dalits arrested in connection with the Bara massacre continue to be on death row after confirmation by even the Supreme Court but those arrested for the Laxmanpur-Bathe massacre have been acquitted by the Patna High Court,” Surendranath says. Between 2000 and 2015, over 1,600 were sentenced to death by trial courts across the country. The conviction rate, however, at the stage of high courts and the Supreme Court is much lower. The Outlook report adds: There have been only three executions in India in the last 18 years. But what is worrying is that every year 110-130 death sentences continue to be awarded by trial courts. The SC, on its part, has been confirming 3-5 of them every year. “The declining trend however fails to gloss over the cavalier manner in which death sentences continue to be awarded and the way convicts are then treated.”