Mukul Rohatgi
The government today told the Supreme Court that it wanted to ban child pornography websites, but expressed its inability to go beyond that and don the role of moral police.
Addressing the apex court bench headed by Chief Justice HL Dattu, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi told the court that the state cannot be present in every household to check what people were watching in private and interfere with their entertainment.
Telling the court that there has to be some self regulation to check the viewing of porn websites, the AG told the court that the state could not be totalitarian.
The AG said this to the court in the course of the hearing of a petition seeking a total clampdown on websites showing pornography.
For full account of today's hearing, check CCG Delhi's report
“Hope died, man died, justice lived,” commented Rishabh Sancheti, one of Yakub Memon's advocates, about the early-morning, eleventh hour Supreme Court hearing that ultimately failed to save his client from the noose. “Have you (heard) it happen in any other country?”
SCOI Reports 28 July 2015: Yakub Abdul Razak Memon vs State of Maharashtra Through the Secretary, Home Department, and Others.
"Justice [Gyan Sudha] Misra, who although sat a little after the scheduled time, never compromised by rising just after half-an-hour. She was the last one to leave the court premises, be it the Supreme Court or High Court. There were absolutely no cause-lists that were not exhausted by her and no judgments that were not churned out by her,” wrote her daughter, advocate Unnati Misra, in a letter to attorney general Mukul Rohatgi, as reported by the Indian Express’s Utkarsh Anand.
She was referring to Rohatgi’s repeated attacks on now retired Supreme Court judge Justice Misra’s habit of coming late to court as a notable example of a bad appointment made by the collegium, in his argument for the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) before the Supreme Court, saying he had “run down the reputation of people who have given their sweat and blood to judicial institutions, all in the name of NJAC, are reflective of bias and based on superficiality”.
However, Unnati Misra said that her mother had been recommended for the Supreme Court in 1986 before the collegium system and she was approved by six chief justices and Chief Justices of India (CJIs) before her elevation to the apex court in 1998 as the fourth woman to ever do so. She also wrote that her Justice Misra had fought “personal battles” caring for her ill husband, who passed away shortly after her retirement.
In 2013, Justice Misra had hit back at a Times of India column arguing that judges were “ultimately human beings” and not “robots”, and that judges “cannot be expected to give an account of every single minute or else face derogatory publicity”.