rape
Listen yaar, the Delhi high court said that women who’ve entered menopause can’t be raped, right?
Pro bono legal assistance NGO iProbono won a Delhi high court appeal yesterday for a now six-year-old rape victim, with the high court slamming the magistrate and trial judge in her case for questioning her like an adult witness while recording her testimony.
A woman judge in Aligarh was allegedly raped at her official residence and escaped attempted murder on Monday, reported the IANS.
A case of rape was registered at the civil lines police station in the city on the complaint of the victim’s brother, however a medical examination was not conducted until the news was reported yesterday.
The victim was found heavily injured, drugged and unconscious at her official residence with an empty bottle of pesticide lying near her.
"Thus the prosecutrix (the wife) and the accused being legally wedded husband and wife, the prosecutrix being major, the sexual intercourse between the two, even if forcible, is not rape and no culpability can be fastened upon the accused," said additional Delhi sessions judge Virender Bhat about a case where the wife alleged she was drugged, dragged to the registrar getting married in March 2013, and then raped and abandoned. She filed the complaint with police in October 2013.
This mirrors the exception to the offence of rape under section 375 of the Indian Penal Code that "sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape".
The accused claimed that the marriage ceremony had taken place in 2011 already and his wife had framed him, while the judge found no "clinching or convincing evidence" that she had been drugged. [IANS]
Lawyer Nandita Saikia discusses how the recent criminal law recent reforms, imposing the death penalty for rape, are a symptom of the problem but not a solution.
India Today senior editor Gayatri Jayaraman has been live-tweeting diligently from the Mumbai sessions court in the Shakti Mills gang rape sentencing hearing today, at which the judge will decide whether the accused will get the death sentence.
The Supreme Court has said that the police should take action in the gang-rape of a woman in a village, which was allegedly ordered by a village panchayat as punishment for her affair. The bench led by the Chief Justice of India (CJI) P Sathasivam was apparently able to do little substantively in the case, beyond order the WB government to pay Rs 5 lakh in compensation, but reiterated the Lalita Kumari guidelines that police must register an FIR on congisable offences and that hospitals must provide free medical assistance to victims of certain offences. "We implore upon the State machinery to work in harmony with each other to safeguard the rights of women in our country," he said.
Amicus curiae and additional solicitor general Sidharth Luthra assisted the court, which took notice of the case after reading newspaper reports about it. [Judgment]
Principal sessions judge Shalini Phansalkar Joshi finds total of 5 men guilty of over two gang-rapes (of photo-journalist in a Mumbai mill last August and of telephone operator in July), two minors tried under juvenile act. Sentencing tomorrow [Hindustan Times]
A Supreme Court bench stayed the execution of two of the four men convicted for the rape and murder of a woman, dubbed Nirbhaya by the media, in December 2012.