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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.