Supreme Court dismisses plea seeking abolition of execution by hanging

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The bench delivered its verdict on a plea, filed in 2017 by senior advocate Rishi Malhotra, seeking removal of the present mode of execution of death row convicts by hanging from the statute. File. | Photo Credit: PTI

The Supreme Court on Tuesday (August 18, 2026) rejected a plea to direct the government to find an alternative to execution by hanging. The court said the petitioner failed to show even a single instance of a botched execution in India.

A Bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta said that methods like lethal injection, practised in the United States, have a history of botched executions.

However, Justice Mehta said the court’s judgment should not be understood as foreclosing future constitutional scrutiny if compelling scientific, medical or empirical evidence emerges against death by hanging.

The court verdict clarified that it should not preclude the Union government from undertaking a comprehensive review of the existing method of execution through an expert body comprising specialists in law, forensic medicine, neuroscience, penology and allied disciplines.

The judgment was based on a petition filed by senior advocate Rishi Malhotra, challenging the constitutional validity of Section 354(5) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which corresponds to Section 393(5) of the Bhartiya Nagarika Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, which prescribed hanging as the only method of execution.

The court judgment relied on studies that “neither electrocution, nor lethal gas, nor shooting, nor even the lethal injection has any distinct or demonstrable advantage over the system of hanging”.

“The preliminaries to the act of hanging are quick and simple, and they are free from anything that would unnecessarily sharpen the poignancy of the prisoner’s apprehension. The chances of an accident during the course of hanging can safely be excluded,” the judgment said.

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