LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Penal Laws 2019 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: two notes of twelve and a half marks each, so give each a page and a half. For (a) do not list sections in numerical order; group them by what is attacked, which shows the examiner that you understand the scheme. For (b) the marks are in knowing that the tribunal no longer exists and in being able to say what replaced it and why.

Offences against the person. Section 66C punishes identity theft, the fraudulent or dishonest use of the electronic signature, password or any other unique identification feature of another person, with three years and fine up to one lakh. Section 66D punishes cheating by personation using a computer resource on the same scale. Section 66E punishes intentionally capturing, publishing or transmitting the image of a private area of a person without consent in circumstances violating privacy, with three years or fine up to two lakh or both.

Offences relating to content. Section 67 punishes publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form, three years and five lakh on a first conviction and five years and ten lakh on a second. Section 67A punishes publishing or transmitting material containing a sexually explicit act, five years and ten lakh, seven years on a second conviction. Section 67B punishes material depicting children in a sexually explicit act and, uniquely, reaches the person who collects, seeks, browses or downloads it. A proviso exempts from all three any work in electronic form whose publication is proved to be justified as being for the public good in the interest of science, literature, art or learning, or which is kept or used bona fide for religious purposes.

What has changed since this paper was set. Section 66A, which punished sending offensive messages, was struck down in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, (2015) 5 SCC 1, as violating Article 19(1)(a) because its terms were open ended and fell outside the eight subjects in Article 19(2); it was finally omitted from the statute book by the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 with effect from 30 November 2023. The same Act decriminalised sections 72 and 72A, breach of confidentiality and disclosure in breach of a lawful contract, converting both into monetary penalties of five lakh and twenty five lakh rupees.

Procedure. Section 77B makes every offence punishable with three years imprisonment bailable, section 78 requires investigation by an officer not below Inspector, section 77A permits compounding except where the punishment is life or exceeds three years, and section 75 applies the Act to conduct outside India involving a computer located in India.

Why it existed. Chapter IX of the Act gave an adjudicating officer, an officer not below the rank of a Director to the Government of India or an equivalent State officer, power under section 46 to award compensation under sections 43 and 43A and penalties under sections 44 and 45. An appeal from an executive adjudicator to an ordinary civil court would have defeated the object of a quick and technically competent remedy, so Parliament created a specialist appellate forum.

Its composition and powers as originally enacted. Section 49 provided for a Chairperson and such number of other Members as the Central Government might notify. Section 50 required the Chairperson to be, or to have been, or to be qualified to be, a Judge of a High Court. Section 51 fixed the term of office and section 52 the salary and conditions of service, which could not be varied to his disadvantage after appointment. Section 53 provided for filling vacancies, section 55 protected the proceedings from invalidity by reason of a defect in constitution, and section 52D provided for a decision by majority.

What happened to it. The Tribunal was constituted, but the post of Chairperson fell vacant in 2011 and was never filled. With no Chairperson it could not hear anything, and the appeals pending before it simply accumulated; the Comptroller and Auditor General recorded the position in a 2016 report. The Finance Act, 2017, by section 169, omitted sections 49, 50, 51, 52, 52A, 52B, 52C, 53, 54 and 56 with effect from 26 May 2017 and merged the Tribunal into the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal. Section 48 now reads simply "Establishment of Appellate Tribunal", and the Appellate Tribunal for the purposes of the Act is the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal established under section 14 of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Act, 1997. Section 44(1) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 has since amended section 14 of that Act to record the jurisdiction expressly.

Assessment. The episode is the clearest failure in the Act's design. Parliament created a specialist tribunal for a specialist statute, allowed it to die of a vacancy, and then folded its work into a tribunal built for telecommunications disputes. The result is that the civil remedy under section 43A, which was for many years the only compensation available to an Indian whose personal data had been lost, has had no functioning specialist appellate forum for most of the Act's life.