Project 39A (National Law University Delhi) Wins Prestigious 'Award For Research' At The 8th World Congress Against The Death Penalty

Project 39A conducts research on death penalty, mental health and criminal justice, torture, forensics, legal aid and sentencing. It also provides pro bono legal representation to death row prisoners across India and to undertrial prisoners in Pune and Nagpur under its Fair Trial Programme.

Since its inception in 2014, Project 39A has regularly produced research on the death penalty. Their first publication, Death Penalty India Report (2016) is a landmark study of all of India's death row prisoners and their socio-economic demography. Project 39A also conducted an opinion study with 60 former Supreme Court judges on their views on the criminal justice system – the report, Matters of Judgment was released in 2017. Having found that less than 5% of all of India's death row cases were being confirmed by the Supreme Court, Project 39A released its report, Death Penalty Sentencing in Trial Courts (2020) focused on trial courts in Maharashtra, Delhi and Madhya Pradesh to understand how India's trial courts sentences people to death and the problems with it. In 2021, it released a first of its kind report on mental health and the death penalty, Deathworthy: A Mental Health Perspective of the Death Penalty. This year, they published The Death Penalty Sentencing in India's Trial Courts, which is an expansion of the previous study and covers all trial courts across India. They also published another report, Death Penalty and the Indian Supreme Court analysing trends in the Supreme Court jurisprudence on the death penalty over the past 15 years. Since 2016, Project 39A has been publishing the Annual Statistics Report on the state of the death penalty in the previous year. Their research work is widely cited, and relied upon by international bodies working on the death penalty. Its submissions and research were referred to by the latest reports of the United Nations Secretary General on the death penalty and the report by United National Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions.

Apart from Project 39A there were 19 other nominations for the 'Award for Research' at the 8th World Congress Against the Death Penalty, including The Marshall Project (US), the Death Penalty Project (UK), and research centres from the University of Oxford, Cornell Law School and Monash University (Melbourne).