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?

A Division Bench of the Bombay High Court on December 1, 2021 passed an order in the Bhima Koregaon violence case (Sudha Bharadwaj v. National Investigation Agency), granting ‘default bail’ to lawyer-activist Sudha Bharadwaj, but denying bail to the eight other co-accused.

It is untenable that a prisoner’s caste identity and social status are used to burden them with degrading labour and unequal treatment in a free and democratic country. Casteist roles and discriminatory practices continue to be legally validated by various State Prison Manuals even today.

The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO) defines all persons under the age of 18 as ‘children’. By making children’s consent irrelevant to the definition of its offences, the statute creates the legal fiction that all sexual contact with a child, so defined, is non-consensual. Green argues that statutory rape offences (which criminalise sexual contact based on age alone, regardless of consent, like POCSO) are instances of overinclusive criminalisation.

As security agencies continue to indiscriminately invoke provisions of the Act, courts must remember to adopt interpretations jurisprudentially closer to the principle of ‘bail, not jail’. By looking beyond the facts of a given case, the courts are likely to create a more equitable, and accessible, system of justice and ensure opportunities to do complete justice are not missed.

Shabnam and her partner Saleem were sentenced to death in 2010 for the murder of seven members of Shabnam’s family. Over the years, all aspects of Shabnam’s life have become a public spectacle: from the “saga” of Shabnam and Saleem’s “bloody and murderous love” to her pregnancy and the birth of her son. As recently as March 2021, a mainstream news media channel reported on an incarcerated Saleem writing couplets in the memory of Shabnam, deemed his “Anarkali”.

Evaluating aggravating and mitigating circumstances facilitate determining just sentences. Disregarding the crucial role mitigating circumstances play in the process is a bad precedent: it encourages a narrow reading of the law that supports increased (and not necessarily fair) punishment by Courts across the country.

The Constitution of India is a document of aspiration. Conceived as what recent scholarship has called a “break from the (colonial) past”, it is accepted knowledge now that the Indian Constitution aspired to establish a state that aimed to replace colonial authority with a democratic republic and that aimed a state-led revolution against an oppressive social order.

In 2019, the Ministry of Home Affairs commissioned the All India Citizens Survey of Police Services (‘AICPS’). It is a nationwide public perception survey aimed to suggest measures to ‘provide citizen centric police services’ in India. Its scope includes an assessment of the impact of police services on the public, gauging perceptions of safety and suggestions on measures to improve public satisfaction of the police.