New Delhi: Two months after a Dalit woman was gang raped and murdered in Telangana’s Asifabad district, three men have been sentenced to death for the crime by a fast-track sessions court. The convicts were also fined Rs 26,000, The News Minute reported.The 30-year-old Scheduled Caste woman was raped and killed on November 24. She was a street hawker, selling utensils, discarded human hair and balloons, according to The Hindu. The brutal assault took place between Ramnaik tanda and Yellapatar villages in Asifabad district’s Lingapur mandal.The three men were arrested on November 27. A special court was set up on December 11, and a nearly 100 page chargesheet filed on December 24. The entire trial lasted for 45 days.The three convicted men – Shaik Babu, 30, Shaik Shabuddin, 40, and Shaik Maqdoom, 35 – are all daily-wage labourers, according to the Times of India. They have been found guilty of murder and gang rape, and under sections of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.The death sentence will now have to be confirmed (or not) by the Telangana high court. The sessions judge gave the convicted men 30 days to appeal to the high court.The crime occurred just days before another gruesome gang rape and murder in the state, of a veterinary doctor in Hyderabad on November 27. In that case, the police arrested four men the day after the woman’s body was found – and killed them in an “encounter” on December 6. As The Wire has reported, much of the evidence against the men was circumstantial, and they were killed before a trial could occur.Also read: Seven Reasons Why We Shouldn’t Demand the Death Penalty for RapeIn the Asifabad case, The Hindu reported, the prosecution called 44 witnesses and also referred to circumstantial evidence based on DNA reports and reports on blood and semen of the accused. Adilabad District Judge M.G. Priyadarshini not only found the accused guilty, but said the crime falls into the “rarest of the rare” category and therefore the convicted men were awarded the death penalty.The woman’s family celebrated the death sentence, according to The Hindu, with her husband thanking the superintendent of police and the additional public prosecutor.This is reportedly the third time the Adilabad Sessions Court has awarded the death sentence. The other two times were in 1974 (for the murder of a moneylender by members of a Naxal group) and 1981. In the 1981 case, the death sentence was not confirmed by the high court.Activists who work with survivors of sexual assault have often questioned the role of harsher punishment in dealing with such crimes. What this does, they argue, is take the focus away from questioning authorities for not doing enough. While trying to prove they are “tough” on criminals, they tend to forego looking at more long-term, systemic solutions, such as those provided by the Justice Verma Commission that was set up after the Nirbhaya gang rape and murder.As legal researchers Maitreyi Misra and Aishwarya Mohanty have pointed out, “…harsher punishments as a proxy for justice and shorter time periods for complicated processes in the guise of speedy justice presume a world entirely different from reality.”There are also other reasons why the death penalty isn’t always favoured in such cases. As criminal law researcher and professor Prabha Kotiswaran told The Wire, “We need to be prepared for the fact that while seemingly progressive criminal laws meant to sound tough on sexual violence may in fact punish a few violent offenders, they could also be invoked against both offenders and non-offenders from weak socio-economic backgrounds who do not have the wherewithal to engage a competent lawyer to ensure that they have a fair trial. We can learn from other countries like the US, with its mass incarceration of African-American men.”