Executing the unrepresented: Legal aid, trial procedure and capital punishment in colonial India

The history of the adversarial criminal trial and legal aid has received significant attention in the context of North America and Europe. This article shifts focus to South Asia, to examine the early debates that developed around access to legal representation under colonial rule, with particular attention paid to capital trials. As the article demonstrates, demands for greater state assistance for poor defendants were made in response to a range of connected factors. These included the very large number of colonial subjects being sentenced to death in India, the passing of the Poor Prisoners’ Defence Act of 1903 in England, and the growing attention paid to wrong verdicts and criminal injustice by Indian newspapers, legal commentators and nationalist politicians. In tracking this history across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I suggest that the reluctance of the colonial state to invest in legal aid schemes, alongside the wider culture of under-investment in the bureaucracy of colonial justice, were important contributing factors that help explain both the scale and application of state violence under colonial rule.