-The New York Times   India has 1.2 billion people, among them bankers, gurus, rag pickers, billionaires, snake charmers, software engineers, lentil farmers, rickshaw drivers, Maoist rebels, Bollywood movie stars and Vedic scholars, to name a few. Humanity runneth over. Except in one profession: India is searching for a hangman. Usually, India would not need one, given the rarity of executions. The last was in 2004. But in May, India's president unexpectedly rejected...

A trail court in Etah in Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday awarded the death sentence to 10 persons on the charge of murdering three persons, including a girl and her paramour, in a suspected case of honour killing. On the night of November 13/14, 2008 Rameshpal Singh, Udaypal Singh alias Bhura and Vidya were beaten up and then shot from point blank range by the girl's relatives at Bilkhatra village. The judgment was...

In a setback to CBI, the Supreme Court on Friday upholds life sentence for Dara Singh, who killed Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two minor sons in January 22, 1999. A bench comprising Justices P Sathasivam and B S Chauhan, while dismissing the agency's plea for death penalty, said the punishment can be imposed only in the "rarest of rare" cases depending upon the facts and situation of each case. The...

The trial court judgment holding Binayak Sen guilty of sedition has led to widespread outrage. IN India's legal history, no trial court judgment in a criminal case has perhaps caused as much international outrage as the December 24, 2010, judgment of the Second Additional District and Sessions Judge of Raipur, B.P. Verma, did. In his 92-page judgment, Judge Verma convicted Dr Binayak Sen, the well-known human rights activist and medical...

The Supreme Court has condemned the stripping and parading of a tribal woman by four upper-caste men 17 years ago, citing it as an example of how tribals are systemically ill-treated and “marginalised” in India. The accused had dismissed the evidence of the victim’s torn clothes claiming that she and other Bhils were poor and usually wore tattered clothes. “This itself shows the mentality of the accused who regard tribal people as...