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.
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the batch of petitions challenging the constitutionality of Section 124A and what it means for the same to be diluted, repealed or struck down.
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 ‘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.
