-The Hindustan Times Patna: The Patna high court on Wednesday set aside the conviction of 26 persons, 16 of them awarded the Death sentence, in a 16-year-old case of massacre of 58 Dalits in a Bihar village. The court acquitted the 26 of all charges for lack of evidence. Two of those awarded death are since dead while a third is absconding. Suspected members of the Ranveer Sena, an outlawed upper caste militia,...

-The Hindu When a Death sentence is given to satisfy the "collective conscience of the community," it raises troubling questions about the fairness of the trial The verdict of death for the bestial gang rape in Delhi last December is based on Supreme Court judgments, which stipulate that capital punishment will be imposed in "the rarest of rare" cases, where the community's "collective conscience is so shocked that it will expect the...

-The Hindu Equating juveniles with adult criminals is neither scientifically correct nor normatively defensible The August 31 verdict of the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) in the Delhi gang rape case, handing down a bare three-year custodial sentence to the juvenile member, has generated a fresh round of debate on the legality and desirability of juvenile justice itself: why should juveniles above 16 indulging in violent crimes not be treated as adult criminals?...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: After doggedly turning down arguments for having a graded response to crimes by juveniles, depending on the gravity of their crime and the juvenile's age, the government is finally coming around to the view the juveniles above 16 years involved in heinous crimes, like murder or gang rape, should be tried as adults under the Indian Penal Code. The change in the outlook of the women...

-The Hindu Prison statistics of the country for the year 2012 released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) last week show that 3,85,135 persons were lodged in the 1,394 jails of the country as on December 31 last, the date considered by the NCRB for tabulating the annual statistics. 95.6 per cent or 3,68,184 of the inmates were male and remaining 4.4 per cent female. During that year another 2,20,542...