They say love is blind—but when it comes to parenting, is it also legally blind?

Let me paint you a picture: a teenage boy, not even 18, bored on a Saturday night, "borrows" Rich Daddy's Merc, revs it up to impress a few girls, and "accidentally" rams down two innocent pedestrians. The father? Shrugs his shoulders and tells police the car was taken without permission. Problem solved. The mother? Sheds dramatic tears on prime-time news, blaming "bad company and content nowadays." The Police? Yawns because they know how mild the law is on juveniles, labeling them "immature" for prosecution.

Today, companies are creating self-automated robots. If tomorrow, one decides to kill someone, would you put the robot behind bars or hold the company responsible? Think.

Any law enforcement would hold the "creator" responsible—not the "creation." The robot was merely a mirror of the company's programming and design choices.

Then why does this perfectly sane logic magically evaporate when children commit crimes?

When a child enters this world, they're nothing but a blank slate waiting to be filled with values, beliefs, and concepts. Or do you really think they come tagged "good" or "bad"?

If a child grows up watching women being subjugated, that seems normal. If ill-treatment of servants is their family's daily routine, they'll naturally do the same. As they say, "The quality of a tree is determined not when it's planted, but while it's being nurtured."

Coming to the original story, you'd be quick to blame the boy. After all, he stole the car and killed the bystanders. But here's the thing: children don't magically turn into law-breaking tornadoes overnight. When a 17-year-old drinks, drives, and kills, it's the result of years of negligence from a household—one that either didn't care, didn't watch, or worse, quietly encouraged such behavior.

This begs the question: Should parents who carelessly handed over the vehicle keys, ignored the signs, and failed their child's moral upbringing face legal consequences? Absolutely.

We never investigate why the teen performed such a heinous crime. What was his mental state? How did his upbringing influence this? What we think was short-temper and anger may have been years of ignorance, neglect, and liberty by his parents. If you knew this hidden story, would you blame him or the ones who made him—his parents?

After all this, one would ask: Are our law-making bodies sleeping?

Well, no. In India today, under Section 75 of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015, parents can be punished for "willful" neglect that leads to a child committing an offense.

Isn't that great? We have a law. What's the issue then? Take a guess how often this is used? About as often as we see unicorns on our roads. Because proving "willful" neglect in court is an Olympic-level hurdle. Most parents simply plead ignorance—and walk free, while victims pay the price.

Critics argue: "What about poor parents who genuinely don't know what their child is up to?" Believable, right? Wrong.

If your child commits a heinous crime, and it turns out you were too busy checking stock prices to notice your underage son buying alcohol, you're not just unlucky—you're negligent. And when that negligence results in innocent lives lost, you deserve criminal liability.

From acid attacks to gang violence, many cases reveal a disturbing pattern: parents who were either willfully blind or criminally negligent. They knew their children were associating with wrong crowds, accessing dangerous materials, or exhibiting violent behavior—but chose family honor over public safety. So, should parents be held legally responsible for their children's crimes? When negligence meets tragedy—absolutely. Because sometimes, the parents who failed to raise the child need to answer for the monster they created.

Written By:
-Vedant Agrawal

A man walks into a bar, drinks till he’s incoherent, and later stabs someone in a fit of drunken rage. In court, he pleads reduced responsibility, saying he was too drunk to know what he was doing. But what impact should that have on the legal consequences?

Welcome to one of criminal law’s most contentious debates: Whether being drunk should lessen or worsen the punishment for a crime. Should society offer leniency to those who cross legal and moral lines in drunken stupor? Or should we hold them even more accountable, for both drinking and the crime? India’s legal system, like many others, draws the line between voluntary and involuntary intoxication. Under Section 85 of the IPC, someone who is drugged or intoxicated against their will may escape liability if they truly did not understand their actions. Fair enough. But under Section 86, if you choose to drink, the law assumes you knew what you were doing, drunk or not. Justice doesn’t hand out “get-out-of-jail-free” cards for bad decisions, but punishes them.

Yet around the world, things aren’t always so clear-cut. In the United States, voluntary intoxication isn’t a defense, but it can affect sentencing. In case of a first-time offence, it softens the punishment. On the other hand, if you’ve been caught drunk driving before, it exacerbates it. In Germany, the concept of ‘Vollrausch’, meaning complete drunkenness, allows for punishment even without intent, making choosing to drink itself a moral commitment.

But what does morality say?

Many argue that intoxication should not reduce culpability. The logic is simple: no one forced you to drink. You knew drinking could make you lose inhibitions and rationale. If you got drunk, then broke the law, you are guilty of two things: getting drunk and breaking the law. Reducing sentences for drunken offenders sends a dangerous message: that consequences can be diluted, quite literally, in a bottle of whiskey. You can outsource your morality to a bottle and expect mercy for it. It undermines the entire concept of accountability. After all, if one can partially escape legal responsibility by claiming intoxication, why not weaponize it as a legal shield? Let’s make one thing clear: alcohol doesn’t commit crimes, people do. And softening drunken punishment gives them a means to escape the consequences.

Take the case of R v Taj (2016). A man stabbed a stranger he thought was a terrorist—his delusion born of past voluntary intoxication. He argued self-defence. The court didn’t buy it.

Why? Because mistakes caused by intoxication stem from deep-rooted intent.

Being drunk didn’t make him innocent. It made him unpredictable, and that’s exactly why society needs protection. And the law was firm about it; you don’t get a free pass because your demons came from your own choices.

Still, some argue the opposite. Alcoholism is, in many cases, a medical condition. It’s a chronic, relapsing brain disease. Should we not treat addicts with compassion? Should we not aim for rehabilitation over retribution? Shouldn’t we consider the mental toll and lowered cognitive function alcohol can cause? Of course, support is vital. But rehabilitation must come after accountability, not instead of it. Because choosing to drink and then committing a crime is like choosing to blindfold yourself before driving: it doesn’t reduce guilt. It proves recklessness, even though you were not in full control at the moment, you knew you wouldn’t be.

Alcohol should never be a blanket excuse, but neither should it be ignored. Courts must distinguish between the occasional drunk and habitual addict, between the irresponsible partier and the mentally ill, and reflect that in their sentencing. No one is merely what they drink. But when drinking harms others, society has every right to hold one accountable, sober or not. Because no nation or society can stay sober when its justice system is drunk on denial.

Written By:
-Kabeer M

The headlines called him a “killer.” His medical records said “schizophrenia.” The truth lay somewhere the court refused to see.

Surendra Mishra killed his wife and two children. To the world, he was just another monster. Another brutal crime to punish. But behind the outrage was a quieter tragedy—a mind falling apart, and a system that chose not to see it.

Surendra had schizophrenia. He had a record of hallucinations and delusions. He had a history of psychiatric treatment for mental illness, battling a reality that fractured every day. One day, he found himself standing over the bodies of the people he loved most, with blood on his hands and a mind not fully his own.

The law did not care.

Section 84 of India’s Penal Code says that if a person is of unsound mind and cannot understand what they are doing, they are not guilty. On paper, it sounds fair. But in reality, it demands impossible proof. It expects the human mind to be perfectly disconnected from reality in the exact moment the crime happens—ignoring how mental illness actually works.

In Surendra’s case, the court did not dismiss his illness. His schizophrenia diagnosis, prior treatment, and mental health history were acknowledged. But the judges ultimately found that these alone did not meet the narrow threshold set by Section 84. They pointed to his actions after the crime—locking the door, fleeing the scene, and hiding evidence—as proof that he understood what he was doing.

The Supreme Court put it cautiously but clearly: “The mere fact that the accused was conceited or had peculiar behaviour or that his behaviour was erratic before and after the occurrence, or that he had been treated for mental illness, is not sufficient to attract the application of Section 84.” In their eyes, schizophrenia was not enough. The law demanded certainty—“unsoundness of mind which materially impairs the cognitive faculties of the accused to the extent of rendering him incapable of knowing the nature of the act.” But mental illness rarely offers such clean divisions.

The judges are not entirely wrong. Courts do have to protect against false defences. They know mental illness is complex, and not everyone with schizophrenia becomes violent. They fear that if they lower the standard, it could open a door for criminals to hide behind a diagnosis.

But this is where the system fails. Courts often treat psychiatric testimony as an afterthought, not as expertise that should shape justice. In Surendra’s trial, his mental health was mentioned, but overshadowed by what he did after the crime. The law looked for a clean narrative, ignoring that schizophrenia does not switch on and off. A person can act in fear, confusion, or delusion yet seem aware on the surface. They can flee because they panic, not because they understand the moral or legal weight of their actions. But the law wants black and white. Mental illness lives in grey.

What Surendra did was horrific. But punishing a man whose mind was collapsing, while ignoring the sickness that shaped his actions, is also a tragedy. The system saw only a monster, not the sickness that shaped his actions.

India’s insanity defence comes from a 19th-century British law. It remains rigid, seeing only sanity or insanity, ignoring the shifting ground where real mental illness lies. Judges still repeat that “not every kind of insanity or madness is recognized by law as a sufficient excuse.” And so, they demand certainty where it barely exists.

Surendra’s case is not unique. It shows us a system too stubborn to evolve, too quick to treat mental illness as an excuse rather than a reality. Justice should protect society. But when it becomes blind punishment, it crushes people already broken by their own minds. Instead, courts should learn to weigh psychiatric evidence with the seriousness it deserves—and when mental illness is evident, ensure individuals are placed under psychiatric care, not simply prisons, protecting society while recognising the scope for improvement of an individual.

Surendra Mishra was not just a killer. He was a man failed by his own mind and by a system that looked away. His case forces us to ask: when a mind collapses, should the law punish as if nothing is broken inside?

The real test of justice is not just how it punishes, but whether it can see the human behind the crime. Because if the law cannot tell the difference between illness and intent—who is truly failing whom?

Written By:
-Gauri

In India, the difference between life and death can hinge on nothing more than an empty phrase: "the rarest of rare." This legal invention, born out of the 1980 Bachan Singh v. The State of Punjab ruling was meant to ensure that the death penalty would be a last resort, a grim exception, not the norm. But four decades later, it’s a hollow mantra that enables a deeply broken, deeply subjective system. Judges claim to weigh the gravity of a crime against the potential for reform, but what they’re really doing is playing God with no clear rules.

This is not justice. It’s judicial roulette.

There is no legal definition of “rarest of rare.” It’s a floating, shapeless standard, a judicial inkblot test where interpretation is everything and consistency is nowhere. One judge’s horror is another judge’s shrug. The same crime, in different courtrooms, can yield opposite outcomes: life for one, death for another. And we're supposed to call that law?

Take Kehar Singh v. Union of India in 1989. Singh was hanged for allegedly conspiring in Indira Gandhi’s assassination. But there was no hard evidence: no eyewitnesses, no direct link to the killing. His death sentence was based almost entirely on circumstantial claims and political proximity. It wasn’t punishment. It was a performance. A public execution to appease national rage, masked in legalese. This is where “rarest of rare” morphs from vague to dangerous; when it stops being a safeguard and starts becoming a weapon of convenience. A doctrine that should protect against misuse of state power ends up enabling it.

The Law Commission of India, in its 262nd report, didn’t mince words: the death penalty, it said, is infected with arbitrariness, disproportionately hits the poor, and has no place in a civilized democracy, except, maybe, in terrorism cases. Amnesty International has gone further, calling it a gross violation of human rights. And yet, India continues to sentence people to death under a rule so undefined it could mean anything, or nothing.

Let’s stop pretending. The death penalty in India isn’t about justice. It’s about optics. It’s about judges trying to match the mood of the nation, police pressuring the system to show “results,” and politicians exploiting the spectacle of state-sanctioned death. It’s about poor people, Dalits, minorities, the voiceless, paying the price for crimes in a system stacked against them from the start. When something as serious as life or death depends on how one judge feels about a loosely defined phrase, it’s not justice. It’s a gamble. And in that gamble, fairness rarely wins.

Written by:
-Aadhya M. Chandani