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Yug Mohit Chaudhry

Yug Mohit Chaudhry, a criminal lawyer, leads the movement for the abolition of the death penalty in India and represents many of the prisoners in imminent danger of execution. He writes regularly in Indian as well as international publications, including for the London School of Economics blogs. He grew up in Mumbai. After completing his master’s in English, he taught at Delhi’s St Stephen’s College, where he was earlier a student, and then got a scholarship to Oxford for a doctorate in English. After completing the doctorate, he obtained his law degree at Cambridge, returned to Oxford to write a book on his doctoral dissertation on Yeats called Yeats: The Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print and then came back to India to practice law. He began practicing law in Mumbai in 2001 as a criminal lawyer working on legal aid in prisons and then moving on to more serious cases including murder and appeals in the high court. It was then that he moved on to the death penalty, on which he had already spent a long time researching. His first post-mercy death penalty case in which the execution was stayed was that of Mahendra Nath Das from Assam in 2011. According to Dr Chaudhry, there is little research on death penalty in India. He and a few others do it voluntarily and NGOs will not touch such cases. The 2014 January 21 decision of the Supreme Court commuting the death sentence of 15 of his death-row clients to life imprisonment was called a ‘miracle’ by Dr. Chaudhry and ‘historic’, and has strengthened his belief that indeed law can bring about change.

2019Current Issue

Death Penalty: From the perspective of the Constitution, Police, Courts and Executive

by Yug Mohit Chaudhry
by Yug Mohit Chaudhry

First Republic Day parade on 1st October 1950. Image source: Link

Why should we abolish the Death Penalty? What is wrong with the Death Penalty? When the United States first struck down the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia, Justice Marshall said that if people only knew how the Death penalty was actually inflicted they would find it shocking, unjust and unpardonable.  There are many reasons why you may oppose the Death Penalty. You may believe that it’s wrong to take life.  You may feel that life is something that is God-given, it can only be taken by God. Or if you are more secular-minded, you may believe that there are limits to the state’s power.  Can the state take a life? In the social contract, is that something we allow the state to do? You may believe that the Death Penalty is error-prone, it is far from fallible. You may believe it is irreversible, unlike other punishments. You may believe it is arbitrarily imposed. The Supreme Court has now restricted the Death Penalty to the rarest of rare cases. And even after the Supreme Court inflicts the Death Penalty, many of those cases are subsequently commuted by the government. 

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