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A review by mansimudgal
The Punished: Stories of Death-Row Prisoners in India by Jahnavi Misra
3.0
The stories in this volume are written with the hope of making readers understand the people we want to kill.
The Punished is a collection of stories written on the basis of interviews with death row prisoners and their families conducted under Project 39A, a criminal justice research and litigation centre based out of NLU, Delhi.
It’s a topic close to my heart, Capital Punishment sounds retributive and something that enables justice (that’s the version we are fed as a society I guess) but research on the subject is fairly clear, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, rather it often becomes a policy tool and a way to punish the already impoverished, uneducated and marginalised masses. Lost is the common human in legal jargons, a shaky criminal justice system, interrogation methods that are questionable and an apathetic society out for blood.
That is not to say that the crimes aren’t heinous and chilling but it’s presence in modern democracies is clearly a blot on its own.
The book strives to make us think of the families left behind, of issues that plague the accused (poverty, illiteracy, mental illness, alcoholism etc.), it also talks of the botched investigations and circumstantial evidences that enable judgements where death penalty is awarded.
Supreme Court’s Bachan Singh Judgement gave us the Rarest of Rare cases doctrine which talks of mitigating circumstances when it comes to awarding capital punishment and the book tries to lay before you the other side of a crime.
Now the limitations; I think to put in so many vignettes in a small book made the experience detached, the writer didn’t want us to sympathise with the people which is an interesting sentiment but at the same time I would have liked detailed back stories to form an informed and humane choice. The vignettes of Fathers and neighbours felt incomplete and absent at times which I guess could be due to lack of access to prisoners at all times. The book would have been dealt better if we would have been introduced to the jurisprudence behind death penalty and it’s abolition, giving an average person more tools to decide and judge.
This topic needs and detailed analysis.
The Punished is a collection of stories written on the basis of interviews with death row prisoners and their families conducted under Project 39A, a criminal justice research and litigation centre based out of NLU, Delhi.
It’s a topic close to my heart, Capital Punishment sounds retributive and something that enables justice (that’s the version we are fed as a society I guess) but research on the subject is fairly clear, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, rather it often becomes a policy tool and a way to punish the already impoverished, uneducated and marginalised masses. Lost is the common human in legal jargons, a shaky criminal justice system, interrogation methods that are questionable and an apathetic society out for blood.
That is not to say that the crimes aren’t heinous and chilling but it’s presence in modern democracies is clearly a blot on its own.
The book strives to make us think of the families left behind, of issues that plague the accused (poverty, illiteracy, mental illness, alcoholism etc.), it also talks of the botched investigations and circumstantial evidences that enable judgements where death penalty is awarded.
Supreme Court’s Bachan Singh Judgement gave us the Rarest of Rare cases doctrine which talks of mitigating circumstances when it comes to awarding capital punishment and the book tries to lay before you the other side of a crime.
Now the limitations; I think to put in so many vignettes in a small book made the experience detached, the writer didn’t want us to sympathise with the people which is an interesting sentiment but at the same time I would have liked detailed back stories to form an informed and humane choice. The vignettes of Fathers and neighbours felt incomplete and absent at times which I guess could be due to lack of access to prisoners at all times. The book would have been dealt better if we would have been introduced to the jurisprudence behind death penalty and it’s abolition, giving an average person more tools to decide and judge.
This topic needs and detailed analysis.