Letter for Life
A plea against the death penalty
A prisoner who is executed after years of living on death row is rarely the same person who was found guilty. They are often changed beyond our imagination. To understand this, *Project 39A had undertaken a unique experiment of exchanging letters with death row prisoners they were representing in courts of law. The results are astounding and reveal clearly the many horrors and structural injustice of the death penalty as a form of punishment. At the same time, they stand as a testament to the humanity of death row prisoners who are at a constant risk of demonisation and otherisation by society. At the core of us all is a being – sometimes nurtured for success and sometimes damaged for failure. But when the end is near, it is the human in us that will die – not our actions. Does anyone have the right to extinguish a life in our quest to extinguish anti-social actions?
“This is the first time anyone has written a letter to me”
“Are you getting released today?” fellow inmates asked Sarita (name changed) who was unable to contain her happiness. She had just received a greeting card for her birthday. It was the first time anyone had gifted her a card. The card had been sent by her legal team at Project 39A.
Sarita is one of the many prisoners on death row that the legal team at Project 39A represents in courts of law, and has been exchanging letters with since 2014. Writing letters to death row inmates that the team Project 39A represents, began as a way to fill in the gaps between the tightly controlled personal meetings in the prison environment. Challenging existing assumptions about capital punishment, a central component of their work is maintaining regular communication with the prisoners they represent, and their families, through letters and prison visits. During the pandemic, letters became the only way to communicate. This exchange soon evolved into a profoundly emotional and revelatory process, allowing for deeper engagement and insights into the lives of prisoners sentenced to death by the state.
This periodic exchange of letters outlived the pandemic and provided insights into the complex psyche of individuals declared as ‘deserving of death’ by the state. To those on the *death row, writing letters offers a channel for self-expression, emotional release, and connection, in ways that personal interviews cannot. The letters are now a rich and rare archive of the voices of citizens whose right to life is under contestation in the courts of law.
The team at Project 39A quickly realised that the letters they were receiving allowed for a much deeper insight into the complex humanity of a person sentenced to death. A letter sent to a prisoner is collectively written by the lawyer representing the case, the mitigation specialist, and an intern who is proficient in the language of the inmate. Apart from information and questions related to the case, a letter seeks to delve into other aspects of the inmate’s life - a memory related to a festival, exchanging notes on national or international events, checking on their physical or emotional health, asking them about their daily routine and so on.
“Letters in some sense help restore their identity,” says CP Shruthi who is part of the Project 39A team. “We express interest in other aspects of their lives, aspects that go beyond the sentence they have been awarded or the crime they are accused of. We let them know that we await their letters.”
“The joy is unparalleled when I receive a letter after some time has passed, and I had given up all hope of receiving it. Often it feels like a friend has written to me after a long time”adds Shruthi, the joy palatable in her voice.
The comfort of connection and shared intimacy that written correspondence offers is also echoed by the inmates. Capital Letters, an online exhibition based on years of correspondence that Project 39A has had with prisoners on death row, allows visitors a peek into this sentiment. The exhibition quotes from a letter that one of the inmates, Kanishk T, wrote to the team “When I received your letter, I felt like I am not in jail at all, but rather, that I’m a patient in a hospital whose doctor had understood his condition and given him medicine that has relieved some of his pain.”
The sentiment is also reflected when a prisoner writes back saying, “Aaj se pehle mujhe kabhi kisi ne khat nahi likha (This is the first time anyone has written a letter to me).”
“How many years can one live like this?”
The letters, however, serve as more than just tools of connection. They also stand witness to the deep trauma, pain, and agony of lives lived on death row. For prisoners sentenced to death, the harshness of life in prisons is aggravated manifold by the unjust rules and policies as well as the discriminatory attitudes of officers, co-inmates, media, and large sections of society towards them and their families.
In the Death Penalty of India Report, Project 39A recorded cases of prisoners spending as many as 21 years on death row; 29 death row prisoners out of 73 in another instance, spent more than 10 years on death row, while 72 out of 73 prisoners spent more than 5 years on death row (2016). Letters often tell their stories of long years spent hanging in the uncertainty of life and death.
In her letter, Neha V talks about this ordeal in the following words “I have no words to express the pain of a terrible punishment like the death penalty with which a person dies every moment. When a person is sentenced to death in the Sessions Court, that person should be hanged after one hour of hearing the sentence. What it is like to live in the shadow of death, only those who are here can understand.”
In another letter, Danish S asks, “How many years can one live like this?”
“Who is this person we are sending to the gallows?”
Death sentence differs from other forms of sentencing by law in a fundamental way. In the 1980 Bachan Singh vs the State of Punjab judgment, the Supreme Court of India set the precedent for “individualised” sentencing for death row prisoners and imposition of the death penalty only in “rarest of rare” cases. The courts were to now consider *mitigating evidence that supports the person’s right to life (mitigating factors) against factors that justify the awarding of the death sentence (aggravating factors). Instead of reducing a prisoner wholly to the crime that they might have committed, the mitigation process works with the knowledge that like everyone else, a person sentenced to death has a multifaceted life. In short, it seeks to ask “Who is this person we are sending to the gallows?”
A fair trial thus requires an interdisciplinary team of mitigation specialists that includes social scientists, psychologists, and criminologists equipped to collect and analyse biographical information about the person involved.
CP Shruthi is a social anthropologist by training. As a part of the mitigation team at Project 39A, a large part of her work involves interacting with families, friends, and acquaintances of the person on death row. This is an intense process that happens over a few weeks. “It takes time to build trust with families,” says Shruthi. “They are guarded in their sharing initially as they worry about saying anything that might adversely affect the case, and the chances of their kin’s survival.” Once some degree of trust is established, families begin to share more openly. “Often, these interviews become a process of reflection for them as well, and they begin to connect the actions or behaviour of the accused to the environment they grew up in and the experiences they lived through while they were growing up” Shruthi adds.
In 2015, President APJ Abdul Kalam responded to a consultation paper published by the Law Commission of India on capital punishment. He was among the few leaders who argued for the abolition of the death penalty in India. In the response, he observed that in a background study of the mercy petitions of death row prisoners reviewed during his term as the president, it was revealed that “almost all the cases had a socio-economic bias.” Later, in a public lecture, Kalam questioned, “Why are so many ‘poor’ people on death row?” However, despite his stance against the death penalty, Kalam wasn’t immune to the prejudices that the criminal justice system in India struggles with. He rejected the mercy petition of inmate Dhananjoy Chatterjee, who was accused of raping and murdering a teenage girl in the apartment complex where he worked as a security guard in Kolkata, in 1990. This caused a high degree of public outrage with the media and citizens demanding Dhananjoy be given the highest punishment permissible by law i.e. capital punishment. 14 years after his rigorous imprisonment, Dhanajoy was hanged to death by the state in 2004. Till the very end, he maintained his innocence in the case. Later investigation into the case by two professors at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, raises serious questions about the evidence used to implicate Dhananjoy, and consequently about his conviction and execution by the state. They published the findings of their investigation in the book titled Adalat-Media-Samaj Ebaṃ Dhananjayer Fansi or Court-Media-Society and the Hanging of Dhananjoy that indicates at Dhananjoy’s likely innocence in the case.
While Kalam’s decision to send Dhananjoy to the gallows raises serious questions, there is truth in his claim about the socio-economic bias in the death penalty cases. As per the Death Penalty India Report by National Law University (2016), 76 percent were found to belong to backward castes and classes, or religious minorities (24.5 percent belonged to SC or ST categories, 34.6 percent belonged to the OBC category and 20.7 percent belonged to religious minorities).
“The more deeply you get to know a person, the harder it becomes to hate”
A death row prisoner, E Chitale, made a similar observation during his time on the sentence when he recalled, “When I came here, I understood that criminals and their relatives who have zero legal knowledge are caught in this tangle. Those who are educated, or in power, do not have to bear this. There's no such (affluent) person who has been given this punishment, it's just the poor.”
The socio-economic profile of death row prisoners also has implications for the mitigation process. Often, the team comes across families who lack basic information about their family members - even birth dates are not recorded. Shruthi, drawing from some of her interactions with the families expands, “The best they can do is to tell us the major event that happened around the birth of the person- for instance, a well was constructed in the village when the person was born; or, that was the year when the village received electricity for the first time. And sometimes they refer to nationally significant events like the person was born when Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister.”
Similarly, there are no medical histories. In the absence of medical records, it is often hard to trace the history of an intellectual disability or a psychological condition that the accused might have suffered from. Often, posing direct questions like “At what age did the individual begin to crawl/ walk/ speak?”does not yield helpful answers to trace their growth history. “It’s not fair to expect parents to remember such details” Shruthi believes. Once again, the team must resort to anecdotal memory of the family members. In some cases, this means asking about any special diet that was administered to the person in their early years. “Different cultures have different prescriptions on foods to be fed to children if they do not show signs of age-appropriate development” she observes. On one such visit, Shruthi recalls stumbling upon a practice where a child is made to sip the leftover water after a bird has drank from it. The hope is for the child to begin chattering like a bird – indicating that the accused might have been a slow learner.
She also shares about the time when she felt frustrated interacting with one of the clients who was on death row “I would ask a question multiple times and not get an answer” Later, when she interviewed the family she discovered that even as a child it was difficult for him to understand what he was being told. After some more prodding, Shruthi realised that it was most likely a case of intellectual disability, which is not uncommon among prisoners on death row.
In 2022, Project 39A published Death worthy, a report that uncovers various facets of mental health among death row prisoners. The report found 11 percent of death row prisoners surveyed to be suffering from an intellectual disability and 76 percent to have low intellectual functioning. The report also suggests that intellectual disability puts an individual at a greater risk of victimisation by a system that is not fully geared to take into consideration the close link between intellectual disability and involvement in crimes, both as perpetrators and victims.
An important part of the mitigation process also involves direct interactions with the prisoners on death row.“Prison interviews are tricky to conduct,”Shruthi notes. Time is a highly rationed commodity for visitors and must be used judiciously. The number of visits allowed is limited, and there is little scope to pause and catch a break. This, however, is only one of the challenges of prison interviews. “Sometimes you don’t like the person sitting across you” Shruthi shares, as she reflects on her experience with a prisoner with whom interactions were particularly difficult. “He would lie a lot during interviews, was manipulative and his manners made me feel deeply unsettled each time I visited him. I would often come out of the interviews feeling a sense of hatred for the person.” She goes on to add, “But, the more deeply you get to know a person, the harder it becomes to hate.” Subsequent interactions with the family of the person allowed Shruthi to put his conduct in some perspective. She discovered that he grew up in a turbulent and insecure environment - economically, physically, and psychologically. “His early years were marred with physical violence, neglect, and most likely instances of sexual abuse. His father had multiple illicit affairs while he was growing up. Manipulation and harshness were manifestations of fear and a deep sense of insecurity that he had grown up with. I realised that he was protecting himself against any possibility of hurt by being the way he is” she explains. “That is my job - to humanise, not the crime, but the person” Shruthi reflects.
“Once I held a rose in my hand to smell it…”
It is not just the uncertainty of one’s ultimate fate that makes the death row years difficult to bear. Prisoners sentenced to death are often subjected to differential treatment within the prisons. Torture, isolation from the rest of the prisoners and extended periods of solitary confinement are common. Although solitary confinement has been identified as a dehumanising punishment and the law has rigorous conditions for awarding solitary confinement to prisoners for no longer than three months overall and for more than 14 days at a stretch (DPIR 2016), Project 39A has recorded several cases of death row prisoners being kept in solitary confinement for years at length.
Capital Letters quotes from a letter written by Zameer C, who had been kept in solitary confinement for five years, following his death sentence. He says, “After 5 years in solitary confinement, sometimes when I speak I get confused by the sound of my voice - is it me speaking? Or is it someone else?”
Unlike other inmates, prisoners on death row are often barred from working inside a prison. They are frequently also discouraged from participating in activities inside the prison, either due to the rules of that prison or because of ostracization they may face from their co-inmates - a harsh reality revealed by Tanay A, in a letter he wrote to the team “I am the only one who is not allowed to go to the library because of my punishment. I am not allowed to play either, but that’s because the other prisoners don’t let me”
Stigma often runs so deep, that even simple joys that might make life in the prison more bearable are forbidden to prisoners sentenced to death. Zameer C shared in his letter,“Once I held a rose in my hand to smell it. The jail officials got suspicious and uprooted all the rose bushes in the jail premises. After that, I never went close to any plant fearing that it might get chopped!”
Personal reminiscences like these bear witness to the inhumanness of the process of capital punishment, and the physical, psychological, social, and economic toll it takes on its victims and their close ones. The same letters, also stand as a testament to the innate humanity of those at the receiving end of the punishment.
“A very human experience”
With each letter, a book is sent out to the client to read. Sometimes they request specific titles. “Biographies and autobiographies are especially popular among the prisoners, and there have been requests for life stories of Nelson Mandela, Dr. BR Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, VD Savarkar” Shruthi recalls. The team also had requests for Arundhati Roy’s ‘God of Small Things’ and the works of Amrita Pritam. At other times, the team selects the title to send to the inmates based on the topics they have previously expressed interest in, either directly or as gauged by the team.
The proficiency level in reading a language also determines the material that is sent to the prisoners. In cases where the prisoner might be at the early stages of reading, the team sends children’s books, and sometimes also picture books, where the prisoner cannot read. In fact, many of the prisoners learn to read and write during their time in the jail. Shruthi shares that the lengthiest letter they received to date was from an inmate who was learning to write at the time. The letter was 150 pages long as the person had copied an entire book as a writing practice.
The low levels of literacy among prisoners on death row are confirmed by the Prison Statistics India 2022. Among prisoners on death row, 61.6 percent had not completed secondary education while 23 percent had never attended school. Low levels of literacy re-emphasise the fact of socio-economic vulnerability among individuals facing death row. It further confirms that individuals least equipped to navigate the convoluted criminal justice system are most likely to be entrapped by it.
Books are popular among the inmates. “We know this because we’ve received letters telling us that co-inmates take away the books to read as soon as they arrive, even before the intended inmate can get their hands on them. It’s like the entire barrack is reading the book, making it a communal activity” Shruthi adds.
She then goes on to share about the letter the team received from an inmate to whom they had sent a copy of Gulliver’s Travels. The person wrote back reflecting on how reading the story of Gulliver’s journey helped him find the strength to deal with the news of being sentenced to death by a court. The following words by Owais L are etched in Capital Letters- “Thank you for sending me Gulliver's Travels. I read about how Gulliver’s ship was shattered in the storms at sea, forcing him to swim all the way to the shore. When he finally touched the sand, he broke down, exhausted. Similarly, I went to the High Court when it confirmed my death sentence. I was completely exhausted and unable to see any way ahead. But then I remembered Gulliver's journey and it gave me strength, patience, and courage.”
Apart from books, the team occasionally sends art material along with letters and encourages prisoners to express themselves through diverse media. “This one time, a prisoner sent a 3D guitar model he had made from an empty matchbox and waste material he found around” Shruthi shares. Some of the artwork made and sent by the prisoners on death row is displayed at the online gallery of Capital Letters. There are sketches and drawings; pictures of 3D models of guitars; a bar of peach-coloured soap on which is carved the name Anjali in bold Hindi letters, along with a sitting Lord Ganesha and a flower with leaves; a 3D card, and sketches. It is as if beauty, life, and faith find expression through recurring motifs of flowers and gods in the artworks of the death row prisoners.
“You know that I can’t say anymore...”
However, not all letters sent by the team receive a response. Counter-intuitively, it is not the lack of literacy that prevents some prisoners from writing back. This is confirmed by Shruthi who shares that they receive letters from prisoners who can’t read or write “They rely on their co-inmates to read the letters we write to them or to write letters on their behalf to send to us.” Often those who don’t write back choose not to do so, either out of (lack of) will or in response to the interception of letters by jail authorities. No piece of paper can enter or exit the cells without scrutiny and censorship by the jail authorities. Some inmates remain wary of their deepest thoughts and their stories being accessed by the jail authorities, and thus avoid writing altogether. But, for those who do choose to write back, it involves self-censoring their letters, even before they are censored by the jail authorities. A sentiment profoundly captured when one of the prisoners wrote in a letter, “You know that I can’t say anymore...”
“We can’t write freely, and they can’t write freely” Shruthi concludes.
There are also times when the letters the team sends, do not reach the prisoners. “Out of ten letters we send, 3-4 letters are withheld by the jail staff for various reasons” Shruthi estimates. “It is when a prisoner complains about not receiving a letter from us in a long time that we realise, the letter we sent some three months ago has not been handed over. In such cases, we must follow up with the authorities to deliver the letter.”
And it is critical that the letters are written, delivered, received, read, and responded to. In the face of pervasive otherisation and demonization of prisoners on death row, these letters are “a very human experience and bear witness to their inherent humanity as well as to its convenient erasure.” Shruthi reiterates. A sentiment she expands thus - “When we think of a prisoner on death row, our instinctive reaction is to imagine a beast.. a monster, someone who committed a gory crime. But when you read the letters they write to us, you realise they feel the same emotions as we do. They too feel happiness. They too feel pain. They too feel joy.”
Footnotes:
Project 39A: NLU-D’s Project 39A came into being, inspired by Article 39-A of the Indian constitution which furthers the values of equal justice and equal opportunity by removing economic and social barriers.
Death Row: Prisoners awarded the death sentence are usually segregated from other prisoners in a separate row of cells. Hence the term ‘Death Row’
Mitigation Process: Mitigating factors or evidence take into account the possibility of a person’s reformation, history of childhood abuse, neglect, trauma resulting from social or personal circumstances, record of criminal activity, cases of intellectual disability or mental-health related issues, among other factors while deciding between sentencing the person to death or for life. Mitigation can, then, be understood as a process that acknowledges the larger personhood of a death row prisoner.
Written by Ritika Chawla
Illustrated by Subhash Vyam
Edited by MJ Neela