-The Times of India LONDON: Amnesty International and Britain have strongly opposed the death penalty awarded to Nirbhaya's rapists. While Amnesty International condemned the decision to hang the four convicted of the crime, saying death penalty will not end violence against women, Britain asked India to refrain from carrying out death sentences and called on the government to establish a moratorium in order to permanently abolish capital punishment. Soon after the fast...

-The Hindustan Times Amid the widespread support for the city court's decision to sentence to death the four convicts responsible for the December 16 gang-rape and murder, there are voices of dissent on whether death penalty is a deterrent against heinous crimes. Jurists opposed to death penalty and human rights groups expressed disappointment over the general euphoria on the death sentence, saying the tendency of looking for quick fix solutions to douse...

-The Hindu     Only the ‘principal offence' in an FIR gets into NCRB data The National Crime Records Bureau, India's official source of crime data, is systematically undercounting virtually every Crime in India on account of a statistical shortcoming, The Hindu has learnt. The December 16 gang rape, which prompted much examination of data on sexual assault in the country, will not even figure in NCRB data on rape owing to this statistical flaw. The...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: More than three decades after carving out 'rarest of rare' category of cases warranting award of death penalty, the Supreme Court found a new mitigating factor - poverty -- to commute a convict's death penalty to life imprisonment. "Poverty, socio-economic, psychic compulsions, undeserved adversities in life are thus some of the mitigating factors, in addition to those indicated in Bachan Singh and Machi Singh cases," said...

-The Hindu Nearly one out of four men in a United Nations study of 10,000 men in Asia admitted to having committed a rape, a report released on Tuesday shows. Marital rape was by far the most common type of rape, followed by the rape of an intimate partner. Sexual entitlement - the "belief that men were entitled to sex regardless of consent" - was the top reason men gave for committing...