-The Hindu There is a need to identify cases in which the courts might have erred in applying the Bachan Singh principle that limits the imposition of the death penalty The Supreme Court’s five-judge Constitution Bench judgment in Bachan Singh (1980) is the source of contemporary death penalty jurisprudence in India. Its major contribution was to limit the imposition of death penalty to the rarest of rare crimes, and for laying down...

-The Hindu From illegal detentions to wrong convictions, India’s terror prosecution is in dire need of attitudinal overhaul Only those condemned to await their own deaths will know what it is to be suddenly blessed with the elixir of life. On November 22, two Kashmiri men found themselves lifted out of the darkness of their death row cells into light, life and liberty after the Delhi High Court set aside their convictions...

-Outlook Jaipur: Holding mobile towers as a health hazard, the Rajasthan High Court today directed telecom service providers operating in the state to remove within two months their towers falling in the vicinity of schools, hospitals and play grounds. The division bench of Chief Justice Arun Mishra and Justice N K Jain Senior held that radiations emitted from mobile phones and mobile base towers are "hazardous to children and patients", as accepted...

-Outlook Former Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi and transparency activist Aruna Roy today moved the Supreme Court, seeking a review of its verdict on appointment of people from judiciary in information panels. They submitted that information commissions are not judicial tribunals and its members are not required to be judicially and legally trained. "The judgement has the potential of seriously impairing the RTI Act. The commissions are not judicial tribunals as they are not...

-The Hindu The cavalier approach of the police, especially in Delhi, to terror investigations has long hampered the country’s fight against terrorism. In many cases, the real culprits remain at large even as responsibility is wrongly fixed on persons who are either innocent or only peripherally connected to a particular incident. The terrible consequences of this unprofessionalism were revealed on Thursday when the Delhi High Court ordered the acquittal of two...