Tuesday 13 November 2012

Dowry Death and Indian Families.


Dowry Death and Indian Families.
In today Indian society dowry is like a norm, we see that people spend lavishly on marriages. The root cause of the problem starts from here, The parents of the bride fulfil all the wishes of groom’s family like spending lavishly on wedding, gifting cars etc. when the bride reaches her matrimonial home, The selfishness of groom’s family grows .Now they demand more things like household items, property etc. Not in the condition to fulfil the infinite demands of groom family, The Groom family starts to harass the newly wedded wife so much and so grave that she thinks it’s better to end the life than to live it. In the end the lavishly solemnized wedding ends into tragic death of the bride. The cause of death is not natural that is for sure, it may be due to poison, suicide, even hanging on the ceiling, burns.
This the most common story of all the dowry related deaths .For this common story there must be a common Law on different footing as that of murder and culpable homicide as the cases of murder and culpable homicide demands much greater evidence and are much complicated. The dowry death is covered in sec 304 B IPC which is -:
(1) Where the death of a woman is caused by any burns or bodily injury or occurs otherwise than under normal circumstances within seven years of her marriage and it is shown that soon before her death she was subjected to cruelty or harassment by her husband or any relative of her husband for, or in connection with, any demand for dowry, such death shall be called" dowry death", and such husband or relative shall be deemed to have caused her death. Explanation.- For the purposes of this sub- section," dowry" shall have the same meaning as in section 2 of the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961 (28 of 1961 ).
(2) Whoever commits dowry death shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than seven years but which may extend to imprisonment for life.

Basic Ingredients-:

1.       There must be a death of the woman.
2.       The death of the woman must be in un natural circumstances.
3.       And there must be evidence that she was subjected to cruelty due to demand of dowry.

So there is a stark difference between section 299/300 and 304B as 299/300 has much wider scope and covers many motives, But sec 304B the main motive is Dowry due to which cruelty and harassment is performed on the bride and due to which she died.

Evidence in 304 B-:

For the protection of harassed party the evidence act comes to rescue for a crime to come under the 4 corners of evidence act, The material evidence is cruelty and harassment on the bride.


113B. Presumption as to dowry death.- When the question is whether a person has committed the dowry death of a women and it is shown that soon before her death such woman had been subjected by such person to cruelty or harassment for, or in connection with, any demand for dowry; the court shall presume that such person had caused the dowry death.

Now due to this section the burden of proof shifts to defendants, now they have to show that they have not done cruelty and harassment in order to evade this section.
Unlike in murder cases there is always presumption of innocence, The section of murder has to pass through quite stringent tests than that of dowry death. In dowry related death those people who are involved in cruelty(relatives) are held to be liable for the dowry death. 

Monday 12 November 2012

U.S. to Expand Its Definition of Rape in Statistics


WASHINGTON — The federal government is changing its longstanding definition of “forcible rape” in compiling national crime statistics — expanding both the definition of victims, to include males, and the types of sexual assault that will be counted in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report.
The new definition, which has been in the works for several months and was formally announced by the Obama administration on Friday, will replace a narrower definition of “forcible rape” with one that includes, among other things, forcible oral or anal penetration. The narrower definition, which is limited to vaginal penetration, has been used since the 1920s in tracking how often such crimes are reported around the country.
Victim advocacy groups have long criticized the old definition as outdated, saying it left out many crimes that were prosecuted as rape under state laws but that were not reflected in national statistics. Last year, an F.B.I. advisory committee of law enforcement agencies agreed to a Justice Department request to update the definition.
“It’s about more than a definition,” Lynn Rosenthal, the White House adviser on violence against women, said in a conference call with reporters to discuss the change. “It’s a change of our understanding of rape and how seriously we take it as a country.”
The old definition — “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will” — covered only forcible penetration of a woman’s vagina by a penis, and excluded many other kinds of sexual assaults that count as rape under more modern definitions.
For example, the outdated definition did not count forcible anal or oral penetration, the penetration of the vagina or anus with an object or other body part, the rape of a man, or the rape of a woman by another woman.
It also did not cover nonconsensual sex that does not involve physical force — like the rape of people who are unable to grant consent because they are drugged, very drunk or younger than the age of statutory consent in their state, a number that varies across the country.
The new definition, which was drafted with input from local and state law enforcement agencies based on more modernized rape laws, encompasses a broader range of such circumstances. Specifically, it covers the “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”
Many states have long since adopted a more expansive definition of rapes in their criminal laws, and officials said that local police departments had been breaking down their numbers and sending only a fraction of the reported rapes to the F.B.I. to comply with outdated federal standards.
For example, the New York Police Department reported 1,369 rapes in 2010, but only 1,036 were entered in the federal figures. However, the police department in Chicago, which had nearly 1,400 reported sexual assaults in 2010, refused to discard cases that did not fit the narrower federal definition when reporting its crime statistics; as a result, the F.B.I.’s uniform crime report — which reported 84,767 forcible rapes that year — did not include any rapes from that city.
The question of what kinds of sexual assault are properly categorized as “rape” recently received greater scrutiny after the high-profile arrest in November of Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Pennsylvania State University who was charged with sexually abusing several boys across a 15-year period.
Reported acts like some that Mr. Sandusky has been accused of — including allegedlysubjecting a 10-year-old boy to anal penetration — would not be counted in national rape statistics under the old definition, but will be counted in them under the new one. The change to the “rape” definition was already in process before the Sandusky case came to light, however.
Victim advocacy groups have called for years for the old definition to be revised, and in more recent years several prominent leaders of law enforcement agencies had joined that chorus. The movement gained force last summer when elements of the Obama administration — including the office of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who as a senator had been a chief sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act — proposed making a formal request to broaden the definition. The change was approved by Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and announced by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
The revision to the definition of rape is only for the purposes of deciding what kinds of incidents will be included in the “rape” category of the F.B.I.’s compilation of national crime statistics. It does not change the underlying criminal codes governing the prosecution of sexual assaults.
The F.B.I. said it expected that it would take several years for all of the 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies around the country that voluntarily contribute data to its Uniform Crime Report to adjust their reporting to include the wider definition of rape, and that as they do so, the number of reported rapes is likely to rise significantly for several years running.
In the meantime, the bureau said it would ask local police departments to continue to break out their statistics for the number of rapes under the old definition so that it can still make a meaningful comparison in the trend of such crime rates when compared with previous years.