The Supreme Court in a rare admission has admitted that its earlier judgments, in one and the same case, upholding the death sentence awarded by the trial court and confirmed by the High Court were a mistake and violation of human rights of the accused.

J Venkatesan of The Hindu has a detailed case history, which reports that a Bench comprising of Justices Aftab Alam and A.K. Ganguly said: “Instances of this court's judgment violating the human rights of the citizens may be extremely rare but it cannot be said that such a situation can never happen. On a review of the reasoning in the petition, we find that the finding in the judgment is vitiated by errors apparent on the face of the record.”

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