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.

On March 28, 2022, the Lok Sabha voted for introducing the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill, 2022 (‘the Bill’). The Bill seeks to collect what it terms as ‘measurements’ 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.

Over the past few years, police forces across States in India have started employing artificial intelligence technology. These ‘predictive policing’ 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.

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.

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.

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.

According to NCRB’s Crime in India Report, 2020, on an average 77 rape cases per day were reported across India in 2020, that is, 28,046 cases during the year. However, as is well known, NCRB figures are generally underreported, as they do not account for instances where an official complaint was not registered with the police.

Commonly referred to as the problem of ‘bootstrapping’, the use of Section 10 poses a simple problem – how can a conspiracy and one’s role in it be proved by first assuming the truth of the existence of such conspiracy and one’s role in it?