The Telangana High Court held that a man who pays for a sex worker's services cannot be prosecuted as a trafficker under section 370 IPC. He may be charged under section 370A(2) only if he knew, or had reason to believe, the woman was trafficked. Mere presence near a brothel is not enough.
Three years after Bachan Singh restricted the death penalty to the 'rarest of rare' cases, a three-judge Bench in Machhi Singh gave that open-textured standard a working structure — five categories of circumstance and a 'balance sheet' method for weighing aggravating against mitigating factors. A digest of the facts, the framework, and the doctrine's contested later trajectory.
A naval officer shot his wife's lover and asked the Supreme Court to call it culpable homicide, not murder. In 1961 the Court refused — the gap between the provocation and the killing was time enough for passion to cool. A digest of the cooling-off test under Exception 1 to s.300 IPC and the trial that helped end the jury in India.
In 1945 the Privy Council acquitted Mahbub Shah of murder, holding that Section 34 IPC demands a pre-arranged plan — a shared intention, not a merely similar one — to fasten constructive liability.
Vivian Bose J.'s 1955 judgment refined Section 34 IPC, holding that common intention may form on the spur of the moment but must be distinguished from a merely similar intention — a distinction 'fine but nonetheless a real one'.
On 29 April 2026, a two-judge bench dismissed thirteen writs, two SLPs and eight contempts in the long-running hate-speech batch, holding that constitutional courts cannot create criminal offences, that no legislative vacuum exists in the IPC/BNS framework, and that police failure to register a suo motu FIR is not, by itself, contempt.
On 6 September 2018, a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in so far as it criminalised consensual sexual conduct between adults. The judgment overruled Suresh Kumar Koushal (2013), deployed the Puttaswamy privacy framework, and supplied four substantial concurring opinions on dignity, equality and constitutional morality. A digest of the holding, the reasoning, and the doctrinal lineage.
On 27 September 2018 — three weeks after Navtej Singh Johar — a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously struck down Section 497 IPC, the colonial-era adultery provision that had treated the wife as the husband's property and the consenting adulterer as a thief of marital chastity. Four concurring opinions deployed the dignity and equality framework to dismantle a provision that had survived more than a century and a half of constitutional silence. A digest of the holding, the doctrinal architecture, and the relationship with the BNS framework.