Professor Miriam Gohara Travels to India to Collaborate with Death Penalty Clinic

Miriam Gohara, Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School, traveled to New Delhi, India, in February to consult with colleagues at the NALSAR University of Law on their work involving capital punishment litigation and research.

Gohara, the Law School’s deputy dean for experiential education, was invited by the university to serve as a panelist and expert for a three-day, closed-door consultation on mitigation and sentencing in death penalty cases in India, held by the university’s Square Circle Clinic for the purpose of developing a handbook on death penalty mitigation.

Gohara founded and directs the Peter Gruber Challenging Mass Incarceration Clinic (CMIC) at the Law School, which offers students hands-on experience in representing clients facing federal and state sentencing or post-conviction hearings as well as a seminar where they can explore alternative approaches to punishment to combat inflated prison populations in the United States. During the consultation, the Square Circle Clinic drew on CMIC’s mitigation model in considering the types of evidence to present in reducing death sentences and in capital trials with the hopes that death will not be imposed in the first place.

“Our Square Circle Clinic colleagues’ work considering the structural contexts for serious crime and its impact on sentencing mirrors the work the Challenging Mass Incarceration Clinic does on behalf of its clients,” said Gohara. “I learned that the Square Circle Clinic’s clients face many of the same hardships that my clinic’s clients face: intense poverty, lack of health care, and discrimination based on color and caste.” 

The Square Circle Clinic is a criminal justice research and legal aid center at the NALSAR University of Law — and the only one of its kind in India. Its mission is to generate critical perspectives on the Indian criminal justice system through pro bono legal representation to death row prisoners across India as well as empirical and doctrinal research on the death penalty, prevention of torture, legal aid, sentencing, mental health and criminal justice, and forensics. 

“Indian capital defense lawyers and mitigation specialists are forging practices to save lives and setting professional standards, just as American death penalty lawyers did in the 1990s and early aughts,” said Gohara. “I was honored to learn from them and be able to share American capital defense experiences with Indian colleagues.”

Gohara has extensive experience and expertise in capital punishment litigation. After graduating from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Gohara spent 16 years as a capital habeas lawyer litigating postconviction cases on behalf of death-sentenced clients in state and federal courts throughout the United States — including at the U.S. Supreme Court. Today, she teaches and writes about capital and noncapital sentencing, incarceration, and the historical and social forces implicated in culpability and punishment and continues some capital representation through CMIC.