Supreme Court asks Parliament to make law to deal with lynching

The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked Parliament to make a law to deal with lynching.

"Horrendous acts of mobocracy cannot be allowed to become new norm and has to be curbed with iron hands," the court said.

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There have been a plethora of lynchings in the recent past. Most of them are sparked by rumours of child-lifting, cow slaughter, or the consumption of beef.

According to news reports, some 29 people have so far been lynched as a result of the child-lifting rumours, and close to 20 because of the rumours of cow slaughter and beef consumption.

A three-judge bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice AMKhanwilkar, and Justice DY Chandrachud has been hearing a plea asking for the formulation of guidelines to curb such vigilantism

The Supreme Court on Tuesday fixed the matter for further hearing on August 28.

The US government meanwhile has reopened an investigation into the 1955 lynching of black teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi, saying it had discovered new information in the case, which helped spark the nation’s civil rights movement.

In August 1955, Till was beaten, shot and mutilated in Money, Mississippi, four days after it was alleged that the black 14-year-old from Chicago had flirted with a white woman.

The woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, and JW Milam were charged with Till’s murder, but the two white men were later acquitted of the crime by an all-white jury. The pair later confessed in a paid magazine interview to abducting and killing the teenager. The two men have since died, in 1994 and 1981, respectively.

“We are happy that they got new evidence to reopen the case. It’s just kind of sad that it’s taken so long,” Charles Hampton, president of the Mississippi NAACP, told Reuters.

The federal case regarding Till was closed in 2007 after the Justice Department had earlier concluded it could no longer prosecute the case. It was referred the district attorney in Mississippi, where a grand jury declined to issue new charges, the department said.

Interest in the case was revived in 2017 with the publication of the book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” which reportedly quotes the white woman in the case, Carolyn Bryant Donham, saying she had lied when she testified against Till.

(With inputs from Reuters)