This justification when viewed with reference to the definition of money laundering and wide list of predicate offences in the Act is lacking. Money laundering as a separate offence is best used to tackle criminal activity by organised groups involving large proceeds.
8
8 Min Read
In the last ten years, the ED has recorded almost 5500 cases under the Act and more than Rs. 1,00,000 crores worth of property has been attached. On the other hand, only twenty three persons have been convicted under the Act since the ED took jurisdiction.
3
3 Min Read
The law and the criminal justice system, we are told, is logical and dispassionate. There is no space in it for the emotions and vulnerabilities of its stakeholders. Consider the life of a âprisonerâ; incarceration isolates them from everyday life and restricts their autonomy so severely as to be dehumanising. Coupled with the experience of being isolated from their loved ones, feelings of powerlessness, anger and humiliation are common.
1
1 Min Read
Hrishika Jain and Prof. Aya Gruber discuss the carceral form of feminism’s engagement with sexual violence, its implications for victims and feminism’s own transformative goals, and the unfulfilled promise of the #MeToo movement as an alternative form of feminist politics.
13
13 Min Read
India has had a long history of encounters as a tool for crime control. In Mumbai, for instance, the infamous âencounter squadâ was used to tackle violent organised crime in the late â90s. The Supreme Court (âSCâ) appointed panel headed by Justice Sirpurkar in its recent report found the encounter by the Telangana police of the four accused in the rape and murder of a 26-year-old veterinarian in 2019 to be âconcoctedâ and the cops involved, guilty of murder.
9
9 Min Read
In this article, I do not attempt to critique the legal reasoning behind the verdict. Instead, I try to understand what the ruling did after its pronouncement, particularly upon receiving loud coverage in the media. While the event was remembered in various media forms including news websites, newspapers, and social media platforms, this piece will focus on its coverage in mainstream television news channels.
1
1 Min Read
Shruthi speaks to Prof TassĂŠ about what intellectual disability is, who can diagnose it, the evolution of jurisprudence on Intellectual disability in the US and the challenges associated with presenting Intellectual Disability in court in the Indian context.
9
9 Min Read
In this article, we seek to explain what mitigation is, and the inadequacies in the present capital sentencing framework that the Supreme Court has set out to address in the suo moto writ.
1
1 Min Read
Adrija Ghosh and Lubhyathi Rangarajan discuss about the developments in the Supreme Court hearings on the batch of petitions challenging the constitutionality of Section 124A and what it means for the same to be diluted, repealed or struck down.
1
1 Min Read
Adrija Ghosh and Dr, Durba Mitra discuss the idea of ‘deviant female sexuality’ that became foundational to modern social thought in colonial India, and continues to be used in contemporary India to regulate and control the lives and bodies of women and sexual minorities.
3
3 Min Read
Project 39A recommends four Indian films – Court (2014), Visaranai (2015), Jai Bhim (2021) and Aakrosh (1980) – which center the experiences of the most marginalised members of society with the criminal justice system, and raise critical questions about the interaction between state power and structural inequality and its impact on justice delivery mechanisms.
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6 Min Read
In this interview, Rukmini S, a data journalist and author discusses with Ayan Gupta, a Death Penalty Fellow at Project 39A about her book and particularly the chapter titled âHow India tangles with Cops and Courtsâ. She analyses data to help us understand how to contextualise and comprehend data relating to crime in India.
10
10 Min Read
The presumption of innocence is a traditional principle of Indian criminal law. Generally speaking, every accused person is presumed innocent until proven guilty by the State. But some Indian statutes deviate from this principle. These deviations are a component of a larger move towards âspecialâ criminal laws to deal with âextraordinaryâ offences which, it is sometimes suggested, ordinary criminal law cannot adequately deal with.
11
11 Min Read
On March 28, 2022, the Lok Sabha voted for introducing the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill, 2022 (âthe Billâ). The Bill seeks to collect what it terms as âmeasurementsâ from certain classes of persons and allows for its processing, storage, preservation, dissemination, and destruction, with the stated aim of identification and investigation in criminal matters and of prevention of crimes.
13
13 Min Read
Over the past few years, police forces across States in India have started employing artificial intelligence technology. These âpredictive policingâ softwares aim at overhauling the system of maintaining crime databases. The process entails collection and analysis of data regarding previous crimes for statistically predicting areas with an increasing probability of criminal activity, or for identifying individuals who may indulge in such activity.
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7 Min Read
On 24 February 2022, even as the UN Security Council held emergency meetings to try and resolve ongoing tensions between Russia and Ukraine, Russia launched a military invasion into Ukraine. Ukraine has filed claims against Russia before the International Court of Justice, and its leaders have also requested the International Criminal Court to open an investigation into the crimes committed during the military invasion. This blog looks at the possible avenues under international criminal law to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
12
12 Min Read
Placing the innocent victim (and not the State) on the opposite side of the scale in an adversarial
model, and thus, invoking the rhetoric of balance, is a useful strategy for the purpose of drawing
attention to the purportedly privileged or exalted position occupied by the rights of the accused at the expense of those of the victim.
5
5 Min Read
What should we do when someone wrongs us? It is a question all of us must deal with at some point in our lives. It is also the question that sits at the core of the design of the criminal justice system: when someone commits a wrong against society, how should the society respond?
1
1 Min Read
In this episode of the P39A Podcast, Devina Malaviya speaks to Philip Mayor of American Civil Liberties Union, Michigan about the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) in the criminal justice system. They discuss the fallibility of the technology and how its use impacts the investigation process. They further explore FRT’s tendency to give the colour of science to biases present in the system.
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12 Min Read
Innocence-based crime dramas in their aim to present individual stories of injustice can undercut deeper criminal justice issues. Given the power of visual media in conveying ideas, it is very important that these ideas are carefully chosen. More so, when dealing with issues as complex as crime and punishment.