Suchergebnisse

"Using case studies and the results of extensive fieldwork, this book considers the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by focusing on the interaction between law, science, and policing in India. The postcolonial Indian police have often been accused of using torture in both routine and exceptional criminal cases, but they, and forensic psychologists, have claimed that lie detectors, brain scans, and narcoanalysis (the use of "truth serum," Sodium Pentothal) represent a paradigm shift away from physical torture; most state high courts in India have upheld this rationale. The Truth Machines examines the emergence and use of these three scientific techniques to analyze two primary themes. First, the book questions whether existing theoretical frameworks for understanding state power and legal violence are adequate to explain constant innovations of the state. Second, it explores the workings of law, science, and policing in the everyday context to generate a theory of state power and legal violence, challenging the monolithic frameworks about this relationship, based on a study of both state and non-state actors. Jinee Lokaneeta argues that the attempt to replace physical torture with truth machines in India fails because it relies on a confessional paradigm that is contiguous with torture. Her work also provides insights into a police institution that is founded and refounded in its everyday interactions between state and non-state actors. Theorizing a concept of Contingent State, this book demonstrates the disaggregated, and decentered nature of state power and legal violence, creating possible sites of critique and intervention"--

K. G. Kannabiran. The Speaking Constitution: A Sisyphean Life in Law (Translated from Telugu by Kalpana Kannabiran). Harper Collins, 2022, 340 pp., ₹699, ISBN 978-93-5629-314-4 (Paperback).

Gautam Bhatia, Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free Speech Under the Indian Constitution. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2016. 347 pp. ₹750. ISBN: 9780199488643 Abhinav Chandrachud, Republic of Rhetoric: Free Speech and the Constitution of India. Gurgaon: Penguin Viking. 2017. 383 pp. ₹599. ISBN: 9780670090013 Anushka Singh, Sedition in Liberal Democracies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2018. 331 pp. ₹995. ISBN: 9780199481699

In this article, I draw on Nasser Hussain's conceptualizations on rule of law, violence, and exception to read the Inquiry Commission Report on the torture and murder of Thangjam Manorama in 2004. While clearly the Commission strongly condemns the torture and murder of Manorama, it continues to represent one of the most serious tensions that exist in the context of the rule of law and emergency that Hussain mentions in British colonial times. The Commission report attempts to resolve the tension between political exigencies and rule of law by restricting itself to being a procedural effort to deal with what is essentially a political and national security regime that ends up being curiously reminiscent of colonial reports. In other words, rather than recognizing the role of extraordinary laws such as AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) in creating such situations, the report primarily recognizes procedural violations as responsible for the violence against Manorama. The report then ends up being a paternalistic symbolic act that fails to acknowledge the political authority of the state in conflict areas and the regime of impunity created by the very existence of the laws such as the AFSPA. However, I note that in the postcolonial context, the contestations of hyperlegality also reflect a tension between a rejection of emergency provisions for the Northeast and an inability to embrace excessive violence that the Constitution otherwise prohibits. I argue that the postcolonial state is unable to contain this tension successfully between political exigencies and the rule of law in the Thangjam Manorama case due to the continued demands for accountability by those resisting this law and protesting her and other deaths. Regardless of the intent of the author, the report following this particular death appears to have generated a fissure in the postcolonial legal narrative that reveals the excessive violence embedded in the AFSPA regime that cannot be easily embraced and yet cannot be denied and becoming increasingly difficult to contain and legitimize.

In this essay, I explore some of the contemporary debates on the role of the Indian Supreme Court in the context of equality and liberty at a moment when it appears that the very reasons for the celebration of judicial review and interventions are under attack by progressive scholars and activists. In reviewing the debates on the role of the Court, I focus on one particular contention that since the realm of social/equality was paramount for the Indian state as a whole, and the Supreme Court post-emergency, the realm of political/liberty was consequently ignored. By revisiting the debate on equality trumping liberty, I acknowledge the critiques of the Court but also point to ways in which certain facets of political liberty do get addressed even in the absence of a focus on liberty. Even if by themselves these judicial interventions may be inadequate to create a due process revolution as far as criminal defendant rights are concerned, they create an "arsenal of tools" available for those concerned with liberty and justice. At the very least, such a conception portrays the Court as less unidimensional than characterized by recent scholarship and retains the Court as a productive site of contestation.

In this article, I analyze the legal discourses surrounding three scientific techniques – lie detectors, brain scans, and narcoanalysis – that are currently being used in criminal investigations in India. I focus on two main themes: First, I analyze the significance of these techniques emerging in a context where custodial torture and deaths occur routinely; Second, I explore the role of the courts in assessing the techniques that were presented as an explicit shift in the mode of state power. I suggest that the legal discourses can be read as indicative both of a liberal state's desire to modernize as well as its specifically postcolonial nature. I argue that contrary to the contention of the courts that the use of these techniques would replace torture in investigations, the edifice defended by the courts actually reflects a flawed attempt at an art of government.

In this paper, I explore the role of popular television imagery of torture in shaping the U.S. legal and political debates over the definition of torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Taking the popular show 24 as an instance of a dominant imagery of torture, I analyze how this imagery of torture informs the definitional distinctions adopted by the United States. I argue that the popular imagery of torture with its emphasis on physical brutality continues to influence the legal and political discourse on torture. Apart from legitimizing a narrow definition of torture, the popular imagery also allows the United States to create an arena of acceptability for apparently less severe forms of violence. Thus, the need to call rose by another name is not just an attempt to deny the presence of torture by using narrow definitions but in addition because of the popular imagery, the present time is represented as an actual moment of progress from earlier more brutal times.

This paper argues that contemporary executions by lethal injection represent spectacles of death. This spectacle of death upholds the sovereignty of the liberal state by evoking a sense of fear among the citizens. The State uses the apparently "painless" & "humane" form of execution by lethal injection to legitimize the death penalty in the U.S. I take the example of McVeigh's execution to suggest that spectacles of execution continue in modern society, along with disciplinary processes that the liberal state depends on for its legitimacy. This paper, thus, aims to contribute towards a rethinking of a Foucauldian notion of power. 30 References. [Copyright 2004 Elsevier Ltd.]