Judicial Attitudes towards the Death Penalty

Former Judge of the Supreme Court of India and former Chief Justice of the High Court of Odisha, Justice Gowda served as Standing Counsel for Bangalore Mahanagara Palike and Karnataka Public Service Commission, Bangalore till his elevation as Additional Judge of the Karnataka High Court on 11th July 1997. He was appointed as a Permanent Judge on 3rd July 1999. Justice Gowda served as the Executive Chairman of Karnataka State Legal Services Authority from 23rd July 2006 to 23rd March 2010. He also served as a member of the National Legal Services Authority, New Delhi from 7th January 2009 to 6th January 2011. He was sworn in as Chief Justice of the Orissa High Court, Cuttack on 25th March 2010. He was elevated as a Judge of the Supreme Court of India on 24th December 2012. He retired on 5th October 2016. Justice Gowda was one of the sixty judges interviewed by Project 39A for Matters of Judgment.

Professor Carolyn Hoyle has been at the University of Oxford Centre for Criminology since 1991 and was Centre Director from 2012 to 2017. She has published empirical and theoretical research on a number of criminological topics including domestic violence, policing, restorative justice, the death penalty, and, latterly wrongful convictions. She teaches courses on the M.Sc. in Criminology & Criminal Justice on: ‘Restorative Justice’; ‘The Death Penalty’; ‘Victims’, and ‘Academic Communication Skills’. She also lectures on Victims and Restorative Justice on the FHS Law degree, and supervises DPhil, MPhil and MSc students on these and other criminological topics. She has recently concluded research into applications to the Criminal Cases Review Commission concerning alleged miscarriages of justice. Her book on this research was published by Oxford University Press in January 2019: Reasons to Doubt: Wrongful Convictions and the Criminal Cases Review Commission.  Professor Hoyle is currently working on studies of foreign nationals at risk of capital punishment in Malaysia, funded by the British Academy and the University of Oxford John Fell Fund.

Mr. Saul Lehrfreund is the co-founder and Co-Executive Director of The Death Penalty Project, an international legal action charity based at Simons Muirhead & Burton solicitors in London. Mr. Lehrfreund specialises in constitutional and international human rights law and has represented prisoners under sentence of death before the domestic courts in the Commonwealth and international tribunals since the organization’s inception in 1992. He has assisted lawyers in many countries (including Uganda, Nigeria, Malawi, Ghana, India and Malaysia) in constitutional cases concerning the death penalty and has participated in expert delegations to Japan, Taiwan, China and India. He is a leading authority on capital punishment and international human rights law and has published and lectured extensively on these topics to a wide range of audiences including the United Nations and the Council of Europe. In November 2000, Mr. Lehrfreund was awarded an MBE for services to international human rights law and in July 2009, he received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws from the University of Reading. 

Dr. Anup Surendranath is the Executive Director of Project 39A (formerly the Centre on the Death Penalty) and an Assistant Professor of Law at National Law University, Delhi. He was invited by Chief Justice R.M. Lodha (as he then was) in May 2014 to serve as the Deputy Registrar (Research) in the Supreme Court and was on deputation to the Supreme Court until August 2015, the last such appointment having been made in the late 80s. Dr. Surendranath completed his M.Phil in Law (Distinction) at the University of Oxford in May 2010, his BCL (Distinction) at the University of Oxford (July 2008) and his B.A., LL.B (Hons.) from NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad in June 2006. Dr. Surendranath was the Director of the Death Penalty Research Project (DPRP) at the National Law University, Delhi between June 2013 – May 2016. In a first of its kind in India, the DPRP resulting in the Death Penalty India Report (May 2016) interviewed all of India’s death row prisoners and their families towards developing a socio-economic profile and mapping their interaction with the criminal justice system. Dr. Surendranath has been consulted by the Law Commission of India and the UNOHCHR Geneva on the death penalty and has spoken extensively at domestic and international forums. In January 2018, Dr. Surendranath was appointed as a member of the Advisory Council at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, University of Oxford.