This week, we intend to address a fairly sombre issue: the death penalty (and we don’t mean the punishments by pollution all those in Delhi have been undergoing). As a result, there will be no crass jokes about how chokers are in fashion these days. We will also avoid jokes about how hanging unto death could make our eyes pop better than Loreal eyeliner.

NLU Delhi’s Centre on the Death Penalty, which has produced a considerable number of influential reports and assisted in representing numerous death row prisoners, has widened its focus and re-branded to become Project 39A.

India reversed its trend of death row population spike since last year, with a drop of nearly 27% in the number of prisoners sentenced to death by sessions courts in 2017, according to the second NLU Delhi Death Penalty Report.

The death penalty would stay on Indian statute books for at least another 50 years, predicted a former Chief Justice of India (CJI) in a wide-ranging study of opinions of former apex court judges conducted by NLU Delhi on the death penalty in India.

For the first time, NLU Delhi’s Centre on the Death Penalty has analysed death penalties across lower courts and released a report, which suggests a picture in which the judiciary ordering a convict killed seems more subject to randomness than an evolving jurisprudence or overarching policy.

A Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Ranjan Gogoi, together with justices PC Pant and UU Lalit, issued a contempt notice on retired Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju in a review petition in the Soumya murder case to which Gogoi had last month surprisingly invited Katju to argue in.

It was a series of surprises wrapped in an enigma, so to speak. In the end, the King of Surprises, Justice Ranjan Gogoi, pretty much proved to those who assembled in Court 5 of the Supreme Court on 17 October that no one could beat him in the game of springing surprises.

On 11 March, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, comprising justices Ranjan Gogoi, Arun Mishra and Prafulla C Pant, after hearing the review petition of three convicts in the 2000 bus burning at Dharmapuri, Tamil Nadu, case in the open court, commuted their death sentences to life sentences.

The Delhi high court today said the 16 December, 2012, Delhi gang-rape “juvenile” convict’s stay can’t be extended in an observation home. A division bench of Chief Justice G Rohini and Justice Jayant Nath said the convict, who was found to be a juvenile at the time of the crime, cannot be kept at t...

As Chief Justice of India (CJI), Justice HL Dattu appeared to be a man in a hurry. However, despite having held the office for a near eternity compared to many other recent CJIs, what he has managed to achieve as a judge and administrator in that time is questionable.

Jail authorities in Pakistan were on Tuesday set to hang a paraplegic who developed tubercular meningitis while on death row after being convicted of murder, which according to rights group will be the 300th execution since the controversial moratorium was lifted in the country. Abdul Basit, 43, who...

The Supreme Court on Friday rejected a plea by Neelam Katara seeking enhancement of sentence to death for Vishal and Vikas Yadav who have been convicted for murdering her son Nitish Katara in February 2002. A bench of Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar and Justice R Banumathi said that while it was a murd...

Maharashtra’s Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has declined to share any information on expenses incurred on hanged 1993 Mumbai blast convict Yakub Memon on grounds that it could affect “the sovereignty, unity and security of the country”, said a RTI applicant. RTI activist Anil Galgali had sou...

A Mumbai special court today awarded death penalty to five and life sentence to seven others, all convicted in the 7/11 serial blasts in Mumbai suburban trains which killed 189 people.

Twelve people were convicted on Friday by a special court here in the 7/11 serial bombings that ripped through Mumbai trains and left 189 people dead. The much anticipated verdict was delivered by Special Judge YD Shinde of the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) court. The court acqu...

The Indian Express reported that the draft of the Law Commission report on the death penalty has recommended abolition of the death penalty immediately in all except terrorism cases, while hoping for a “swift and irreversible” “movement towards absolute abolition” of the death penalty.

The Ministry of Law and Justice Press Information Bureau (PIB) has issued a press release that this morning’s Indian Express story had incorrectly reported that the Law Commission had recommended in its draft report that the death penalty should be abolished for anything other than terrorism offences.

A death row prisoner, convicted of killing four policemen, was hanged on Tuesday in Pakistan, a media report said. The execution took place in Punjab province’s Bahawalpur city, Dawn online reported Zulfiqar was sentenced to death after he was found guilty of killing four policemen in 1997. Pakistan...

The Supreme Court today upheld the conviction of the son of Uttar Pradesh politician DP Yadav, Vikas Yadav, his cousin Vishal Yadav and accomplice Sukhdev Pehlwan in the Nitish Katara murder case but issued notice to the Uttar Pradesh government on the quantum of sentence. Upholding the conviction o...

The hearing of this case continued yesterday with Rakesh Dwivedi, counsel for both Tamil Nadu and West Bengal in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, arguing the whole day that state governments should have the power to suspend or remit sentences or exercise mercy by using their own discretion.