-The Times of India Revealing the casual manner in which mercy petitions are dealt with, the Supreme Court found that former President APJ Abdul Kalam's 2005 note favouring commutation of Mahendra Nath Das's death penalty to life term was never placed before his successor Pratibha Patil, who rejected Das's mercy plea in 2011. This and the 12-year delay in deciding Das's mercy plea were cited by a bench of Justices G S...

-The Hindu "Freedom without limits is just a word" -Terry Pratchett Kamlesh Vaswani's PIL seeking to ban the viewing of pornography and make it a non-bailable offence has raised eyebrows. Columnists and social media commentators have greeted the idea with shock, raising issues such as social liberty, sexual freedom, and the fact that the mere banning of pornography might not bring down the incidence of rape. On the surface of it, this sounds...

-The Hindu In the Bhullar case, the Supreme Court has created a category of ‘terrorists' among those sentenced to death without providing a constitutional basis for it Writing on extra-judicial killings in the Economic and Political Weekly in March 1996, K.G. Kannabiran narrated a very interesting anecdote from his experience on the Civil Rights Committee appointed by Jayaprakash Narayan to investigate fake encounters orchestrated during the Emergency against naxalites. While interacting with...

-The Indian Express   Rattanpura, Rajasthan: On May 22, 2006, orders were passed to release Jagdish, a murder convict lodged in Hisar jail. But it took almost seven years for the orders to be implemented. Jagdish, a resident of Rattanpura in Hanumangarh district of Rajasthan, was finally freed on April 6 this year. While nobody from his family was willing to stand surety for him, the Haryana and Rajasthan authorities engaged in a...

-The Hindu   This, however, would not apply when the accused is given life sentence The higher judiciary can impose 20, 25 or 30 years' sentence in a murder case while commuting the death penalty of the accused to Life imprisonment in cases which do not fall into the ‘rarest of rare' category. It can also limit the remission power of the State government, a Bench of Justices P. Sathasivam and M.Y. Eqbal,...