Partners

The Clinic provides pro bono legal representation to prisoners sentenced to death at appellate courts in India, and to undertrial prisoners in Pune and Nagpur. The Clinic also conducts research on issues plaguing the criminal justice system, including mental health, legal aid, torture, forensics, the death penalty, and criminalisation and punishment. The intervention in areas of mental health has led the Supreme Court to direct that death row prisoners have the right to meet mental health professionals and allow mitigation investigators to interview death row prisoners to effectively collect and present mitigating circumstances as part of their defence. 

Members of The Clinic have led groundbreaking work on mental health and the death penalty. They conceptualised and led the work on the report, Deathworthy: A Mental Health Perspective of the Death Penalty, a longitudinal research project analysing the lives of 88 prisoners on death row. The findings of the project revealed an unaddressed mental health crisis among death row prisoners, where a strikingly large number (62.2%) were living with at least one mental illness; the most common being Major Depressive Disorder, Generalised Anxiety Disorder, and Substance Use. The findings also highlighted that 11% of the prisoners were found to have a (previously unidentified) intellectual disability. 

Members of The Square Circle Clinic have also conducted several capacity-building workshops for stakeholders in the criminal justice system, including judges, prison authorities and lawyers. In collaboration with the Delhi Judicial Academy, they designed and conducted capacity-building workshops for session judges and magistrates in Delhi. They conducted a two-day capacity-building work for prison officials, specifically on mental health and prison, in 2017. They have conducted capacity-building sessions for lawyers on forensic evidence and mental health vis-à-vis sentencing. They have also curated a course on the online learning platform FutureLearn to disseminate knowledge on mental health and criminal justice. 

As part of its advocacy work, MHI has also supported the work on the World Psychiatric Association’s Position Statement on Mental Health and the Death Penalty led by Maitreyi Misra, which was approved at the General Assembly in Vienna on 30 September 2023. It recognises that the continued imposition of the sentence of death against persons with mental disabilities violates their rights. 

MHI also supported members of The Clinic in their involvement with an ongoing public interest litigation in West Bengal, where the Calcutta High Court is hearing a case on the state of mental health care in prisons.

Project with MHI

In partnership with Mariwala Health Initiative, The Square Circle Clinic is continuing the work on the year-long ICD Programme. The programme - conceptualised and organised by members of The Clinic - began in December 2024 with a 4-day residential training workshop for 20 mental health professionals, including psychiatric social workers, to build their capacity to assist the defence in death penalty cases.  The pedagogy of this one-year course includes a residential workshop, quarterly follow-up sessions, and engagement with live cases during the year following the workshop. The workshop, including a detailed curriculum and reading materials, was developed in collaboration with faculty from India and the United States. 

The aim of the course is to address a severe lack of mental health professionals who are familiar with death penalty law and to create a cadre of mental health professionals who are familiar with death penalty law and can assist the defence. To ensure holistic defence for prisoners sentenced to death, it is essential to present facets of a death row prisoner’s life that cater to essential questions regarding blameworthiness that the death penalty sentencing is meant to answer. The course will build the capacities of mental health professionals to provide their expertise to this endeavour. The interdisciplinary faculty for this workshop includes experts from the field of law as well as mental health.

Head here to find out more about The Square Circle Clinic.