Justice Kannan's Legal speak

On 17.7.2009, a Division Bench of the Punjab & Haryana High Court, comprising of Justice Surya Kant and Augustine George Masih decided a case ordering the termination of the pregnancy of a rape victim, who was mentally retarded person and an orphan at that, staying in a Government Care Home. The judgment is like it has never come in any part of the world. A poignant tale of a girl discarded on road, picked up to be brought up in government run homes. Her mental retardation and inability to protect herself adequately, heightened her vulnerability to be repeatedly raped allegedly by male guards employed at the Home, aided as they were, by an Ayah for money to be ravished in the bathrooms. The law distinguishes between mentally ill people from a mentally retarded person. The guardian procedures are consequently different: in the former, it would be the Mental Health Act and in the latter, it is the National Trust for Welfare of Persons with Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Mental Retardation a...

Bury the body or cremate it, whatever way you may want, it may be yet a matter of personal preference, but normally, the religion that the person was born to, dictates the choice. The integrity of the body is always desired, as it goes up in flames or allowed to putrefy. Any internal organs that are harvested after death and before delivery to relatives may leave no trace in the external appearance of the human frame. For the same reason, when the eyeballs are removed from the dead person, it is considered ethical that the sockets are stuffed and the eyelids are made to look normal. Even a mutilated body by accident or bomb blast are pieced together and stitched up before it is buried or cremated. When Michael Jackson’s brain was redelivered to the relatives after clinical examination for the criminal case that has been registered and for finding the cause of death, the brain was surgically re-fixed within the skull. Now that the body is fully integrated, the burial, it is expected, ma...