Set in place by a 42-year-old Supreme Court judgement, Indian law requires judges to consider a convict’s life story and the probability of reform in deciding life imprisonment or a death sentence. That ruling has been largely violated, as a study of trial-court judgements makes clear, because the law is fuzzy. Is it really possible to ensure no one is unlawfully sentenced to death? A Supreme Court Constitution bench will have to figure that out.

On September 19th, 2022, a 3-judge bench of the Supreme Court referred certain issues of death penalty sentencing to a larger constitutional bench. One of these issues relates to the amount of time required to collect and present mitigation evidence at the stage of sentencing. This issue is particularly important because, as evidenced by Project 39A’s study, sentencing persons to death on the same day as their conviction is pervasive across trial courts.

The Supreme Court in a recent order referred issues relating to capital sentencing in India to a Constitution bench. Unlike the dominant Supreme Court jurisprudence that has articulated inconsistent application of the Bachan Singh framework as the problem with capital sentencing, the referral order, in a markedly distinct approach, recognises the underdeveloped nature of the law.

The imagination of legal representation in capital cases is limited to lawyers. Mitigation, however, needs to be conducted by individuals trained in social work, sociology or psychology.

The Supreme Court has done well to acknowledge that capital punishment needs closer scrutiny and referring the matter to a five-judge bench. The problem that the Supreme Court’s reference to a Constitution Bench seeks to remedy is the need to achieve consistency on the requirements of a fair, meaningful and effective sentencing hearing

The SC does not allow standalone mental facts to trigger the exception under Section 27, but does not clearly explain why. This post argues that a possible reason is that mere mental facts do not guarantee the truthfulness or trustworthiness of information given by the accused, whereas the recovery of a physical object offers this guarantee.

The right to presumed innocence has not been given the status of a fundamental right in the Indian legal system. Yet, its status as a universal human right, crucial to the fairness of criminal trials, has been widely recognised in democratic legal systems.

One of the issues raised before the Court by the Petitioners was that the officers of the Enforcement Directorate [“ED”] were “police officers”, and thus bound by the rigours of Section 25 of the Evidence Act (inadmissibility of confessions before a police officer in evidence), as well as Chapter XII of the Code of Criminal Procedure [“CrPC”].

In upholding the validity of India’s money laundering law, the Supreme Court on 27 July 2022, created a new normal in the country’s justice system, overturning the basic principles of criminal law, deferring to Parliament and the government and subverting its own powers of independent judicial review.

The judgement in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary v. Union of India has created a situation where the State can arrest anyone without telling them precisely what crime they are supposed to have committed and where no court will be able to release them for an extended period. Differently put, history has repeated itself, and we have arrived back at ADM Jabalpur.

On 27 July 2022, the Supreme Court of India in Vijay Madanal Choudhary v Union of India, upheld the validity of various provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (‘the Act’). Here is a summary of the findings and reasoning of the Court on key provisions of the Act.

On 27 July 2022, the three-judge bench headed by J. Khanwilkar upheld the constitutional validity of various provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002. Through a series of articles and podcasts, we explain and explore the fallout of the judgment for money-laundering trials across the country as well as the criminal justice system at large.

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.

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.

India has had a long history of encounters as a tool for crime control. In Mumbai, for instance, the infamous ‘encounter squad’ was used to tackle violent organised crime in the late ’90s. The Supreme Court (‘SC’) 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 “concocted” and the cops involved, guilty of murder.

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.

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.

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 ‘How India tangles with Cops and Courts’. She analyses data to help us understand how to contextualise and comprehend data relating to crime in India.

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 “special” criminal laws to deal with “extraordinary” offences which, it is sometimes suggested, ordinary criminal law cannot adequately deal with.