Redefining life imprisonment sentencing for capital offences in India

In 2025, the Square Circle Clinic, a criminal justice initiative based out of NALSAR University, Hyderabad, released a report titled The Death Penalty in India: Annual Statistics Report 2025 and 10 years of Death Penalty Data (2016-2025) (hereinafter ‘the Report’). The Report provides insights on the death sentences being imposed in India and the journey that capital punishment has undertaken in the last 10 years in the country. The data in the Report indicates that, when reviewing death sentences, appellate courts have found it more appropriate to commute capital sentences rather than uphold them. In India’s criminal procedure, state governments or the central government have the power to grant remissions of punishment. Based on certain pre-determined criteria, mostly around good conduct in prison, the government may order the release of a prisoner before their legislatively prescribed and judicially imposed sentence is completed. Crucially, the grant of remission does not alter the nature of the sentence.

When commuting death sentences, the appellate judiciary in India now has multiple options. It could commute the death sentence to (a) a sentence of life imprisonment with no interference in the government’s statutory power to grant remission for early release, (b) to a sentence of life imprisonment which excludes the government’s remission powers for a fixed number of years (also known as fixed-term sentences), or (c) to a sentence of life imprisonment which excludes the government’s remission powers for the rest of the natural life of the prisoner (in effect, imprisonment till death). The Report recorded that of the 586 death sentences that were commuted by appellate courts between 2016 to 2025, 59% were commutations where remission powers were excluded (either for a certain period or for the rest of natural life).

The primary object of the remission system is to encourage reformation and good behaviour in prison. These death penalty commutation numbers indicate that over time a new sentencing practice has steadily taken root - one that increasingly sidelines the state’s powers to grant remission (and thus the possibility of early release of a person sentenced to life imprisonment) and raises deeper questions about the shifting balance between judicial sentencing power and remission powers of the State. Effectively, this results in the crafting of a new punishment within the meaning of life imprisonment by the judiciary. This piece examines how by imposing life sentences barring remission, the Indian judiciary has fundamentally redefined life imprisonment from being till the end of natural life (subject to remission) into a set of judicially controlled and predeterminate punishments.

'Despair' by Magnus Enckell, oil on canvas, 1919.

Life imprisonment is one of the five types of punishment prescribed under the Section 4 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (erstwhile Section 53 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860). The Supreme Court in Gopal Vinayak Godse v State of Maharashtra (1961) (hereinafter ‘Godse’) clarified the meaning of punishment for life. The Court ruled that life imprisonment, insofar as the judicial determination of sentence is to be considered, is to be seen as extending until the end of the natural life of the prisoner. However, that does not stop the executive from exercising its statutory remission powers to determine early release of life sentence prisoners. The Court also clarified that remission was not a right of the prisoner and did not guarantee automatic release. Rather, remission is an opportunity for the prisoner to earn credit towards the possibility of early release, as incarceration till the end of natural life was an undefined punishment dependent on a variable of age of death which was not certain or foreseeable. Nevertheless, shifts in the understanding of remission and its impact on sentences of life imprisonment started appearing almost half a century after Godse. In Swamy Shraddhanand v State of Karnataka (2008), the Supreme Court highlighted that in certain instances the death penalty may be too excessive, but the alternate punishment of life imprisonment (where convicts can be considered for early release after 14 years through the government’s remission powers) might be too lenient. The statutory requirement is that a person sentenced to life imprisonment must spend a minimum of 14 years in prison before they could be considered for release by the government using its remission powers. However, the Court took the view that, as a matter of practice, a life sentence had more or less come to mean automatic release after 14 years rather than becoming eligible for release after 14 years. This default 14-year period, in their opinion, was too lenient in instances of capital offences. As a via media between the unwarranted harshness of the death sentence and the misunderstood overly ‘lenient’ sentence of life imprisonment, the Court resolved that in certain instances it would be open to the Indian judiciary to exclude the state’s powers of remission for a fixed period of years or for the entirety of a person’s life.

A few years later, a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court in Union of India v. V. Sriharan @ Murugan & Ors (2015) (hereinafter ‘Sriharan’) had the opportunity to test the constitutional validity of judicial restriction of the state’s powers to grant remission. The Court upheld the power of appellate courts to exclude remission powers of the government when commuting a death sentence to life imprisonment. After the judgment in Sriharan, subsequent questions arose as to whether an individual would be entitled to an automatic release after the fixed-term exclusion of remission powers had expired. For example, if an individual’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment with remission excluded for actual 30 years in prison, did it mean that the individual would become eligible to be considered for release after 30 years or did it mean that the person would be entitled to release as soon as 30 years were completed?

The Supreme Court answered this in Sukhdev Yadav v. State of NCT of Delhi (2025) (hereinafter ‘Sukhdev’) by holding that such prisoners would be entitled to automatic and immediate release. The Court reasoned that once such a prisoner became eligible for remission (particularly after serving a lengthy sentence) requiring a further application to the government can lead to arbitrary outcomes, unnecessary continued incarceration, and an unfair shifting of the burden onto the prisoner. Hence, no prisoner under these circumstances would need to apply to the government to be considered for release. Once we accept that the options identified in Sriharan are part of sentencing law in India, the ruling in Sukhdev comes as welcome relief to prisoners who are imprisoned for life excluding remission. Otherwise, the expectation would be to not only complete the sentence till the extended period of remission exclusion, but then to also subsequently wait for the State to consider and grant remission.

However, what is to be noted is that the Court, in introducing these fixed-term sentences, complicates the meaning(s) of a sentence of life imprisonment. Even with the judgment in Sriharan, it was not the court that was determining the date of release. Even if the death sentence was commuted to a life sentence excluding remission for 30/40 years, the life sentence (in the judicial sense) still meant full life until the executive used its remission powers to release the prisoner after the 30/40 year period. Yet, with the ruling in Sukhdev, the position that judicially life imprisonment means full life is no longer tenable. In a post-Sriharan context where courts could exclude remission, automatic and immediate release after a fixed-term sentence is certainly better aligned with a human rights framework, as convicts then do not have to wait for the government to exercise its remission powers. It does however create significant doctrinal inconsistency. The ruling in Sukhdev has in effect introduced fixed-term sentences as a form of life imprisonment. In doing so, it makes the meaning of life imprisonment as provided in Godse, which is the end of natural life, redundant.

The introduction of fixed-term sentences within the Indian judicial system, which was initially framed as a pragmatic compromise between the death penalty and ordinary life imprisonment has, over time, reshaped the meaning of life imprisonment. The evolution from Godse to Sriharan and then Sukhdev demonstrates that the judiciary has narrowed the statutory space that was traditionally reserved for the executive to assess the reform in a prisoner, reward their good conduct, and reconsider the necessity of continued incarceration till the end of natural life. In this way, by judicially redefining life imprisonment, there is a shift in the power to enforce reformatory justice. It reflects the reconfiguration of the constitutional balance between judicial sentencing power and executive powers of remission.

Ankita Talukdar is a researcher at the Square Circle Clinic, India, focusing on criminal justice reform, with a particular focus on the death penalty. She holds an LLB from WBNUJS, Kolkata and an LLM in International Children’s Rights from Leiden University. The author would like to thank Maitreyi Misra for her guidance.