-The Times of India President Pranab Mukherjee, having rejected the mercy petitions of seven death row convicts in less than seven months of assuming office, may appear to have a hard line on capital punishment but experts say he does not have much discretion in the matter. While the statute grants clemency powers to the President through Article 72, constitutional experts say the power to grant pardon is not personal but...

-The Times of India The Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) through an appeal on Monday urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to abolish death penalty and spare Veerappan's associates - Gnanaprakash, Simon, Meesekar Madaiah and Bilavendran from the impending execution. These associates of Veerappan were sentenced to death in 2004 in connection with a landmine blast at Palar in Karnataka in 1993 in which 22 police personnel were killed and their mercy...

-The Telegraph The world lauds us as the largest democracy. Yet, how much of a democracy are we and where must we improve? Elections and their consequences: We have regular elections. They are supervised with increasing effectiveness as far as booth capturing, bogus voters and violence are concerned. The influence of money has not waned; if anything, it has increased. It is not as it used to be, for paying voters only....

-The Times of India India may be reporting one death penalty every third day but it also commutes one capital punishment to life imprisonment every day - thanks to Delhi which leads the chart by making course correction in old cases. The national Capital, which reported 71 death penalties during 2001-11, saw 2,462 commutations in that 11-year period - accounting for more than 50% of the total commutations (4,321) in the...

-The Telegraph Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today asked lawyers to acquire the expertise required to deal with international business laws, intellectual property rights and arbitration agreements as they had a bearing on the domestic situation. Singh also urged the legal fraternity to join hands with the government in providing speedy justice to the common man and expressed concern over the increasing number of pending cases in Courts. Speaking at the golden jubilee celebrations...