Extrajudicial Killings Research Articles

Terrorism as a Public Emergency: The Imperative for Human Rights Compliant Counter Terrorism Strategies in Nigeria

Terrorism clearly has a very real and direct impact on human rights, with devastating consequences for the enjoyment of the right to life, liberty and physical integrity of victims. Globally, terrorism is now viewed as a public emergency and post 9/11 counter terrorism strategies have combated terrorism as one would a public emergency. Nigeria desired the protection of its citizens from the violations of their human rights hence the enactment of certain counter terrorism strategies. This paper investigated the extent to which counter terrorism strategies enacted and implemented by the Nigerian state resonate with international best practices for protection of human rights while confronting a public emergency. The paper found that Nigeria seemed to have designed her counter terrorism strategies to counter the very lofty ideals of human rights which she is internationally obligated to protect. The study concluded that internationally accepted norms for derogation under international human rights law in the face of public emergency has been exceeded by the Nigerian state through draconian strategies such as arbitrary arrest, unlawful detention, extra judicial killings, inhumane treatment and torture. The paper recommended both normative and institutional reforms such that the Nigerian counter-terrorism legal framework becomes anchored on internationally accepted norms of non-derogation of core rights to life, personal dignity, freedom from torture, cruel and inhumane treatment even in times of public emergency. Keywords: Counter terrorism strategies, Human Rights, Public Emergency, Terrorism. DOI: 10.7176/JLPG/117-06 Publication date: January 31 st 2022

THE IMPACT OF TRAUMA FOR RELIGIOUS IDENTITY AFTER CIVIL CONFLICT: STUDY AT BOARDING SCHOOL BABUL ALA NURILLAH BEUTONG ATEUH NAGAN RAYA ACEH INDONESIA

The impact of prolonged civil conflict in Aceh has caused lost family and mental disorder to the local community. One of the tragedy occurred during conflict in Aceh was the killing tragedy in Boarding School Babul 'Ala Nurillah, Blang Meurandeh village Beutong Blang Galang Nagan Raya Aceh Province Indonesia on July 23, 1999 and killed more than 50 man when they are in Boarding School ( Dayah) and learn Islamic knowledge.The peace agreement after conflict between Free Aceh Movement and Indonesia Goverment has 16 years ago since August 18, 2005. They are saw their husband killed by army, andmany women became widows and became poor life. The purpose of this study is to know how the traumatic post conflict and misdevelopment about the religious identity. The Method of this study used quantitative and qualitative method, used scale TSI (Trauma Syndrome Inventory) for trauma by Briere with 100 items and MRPI (Muslim Religious-Personality Inventory) for scale religious identity. MRPI has 47 item. The sample in this research 25 Woman and 5 man who directly saw the extrajudicial killing, this sample technique used random assigned sampling.The result showed that the victims there are have traumatized is: high trauma 3, low trauma 3, and middle trauma 24 person . The result of this study is that there is a relationship between trauma and religious identity is low r = -0,312. The correlation beetween trauma and Islamic worldview and spiritual is r = 0.312 (low), trauma with ritual r= 0.543 (medium), trauma with muamalat = 0.157 (very low). This meaning that although the victims feel traumatized but their ritual (hablun min Allah) still good in medium correlation, but the correlation between trauma and Islamic worldview and spiritual is low, and correlation between trauma and mu’amalat (hablun min an-naas) is very low, as well as in religious personality which is divided into Islamic worldview and spiritual, ritual (hablun minallah) and muamalat (hablun min an-naas). After twenty years ago they can to growth with their self and they want to forgotten the tragedy July 23 1999, and want to live in peace. And now they have the commitment to explore and learn Islamic knowledge again after twenty years ago they life without learning the Islamic knowledge in boarding school.

Development of a Convergence Model for Social Communication of a Philippine Catholic Parish Church

Social communication is an essential church activity considering the flock's profile and the COVID-19 pandemic. The study determined the convergence and divergence of the parishioners in a Philippine Catholic Church Parish in the City of Dasmariñas, Cavite on Respect for Life, using content analysis and survey methods as bases for the development of a model for social communication. Results revealed that respondents were 31 years-old, female, married, college graduates, or attended college, with the parish for 16-30 years, Sunday Church-goers only, and not members of any Church-based organizations. Parishioners had converging conceptions about the "War on Drugs," extrajudicial killings, and the death penalty even when they could not join Church activities. Parishioners' compliance was acceptable with five convergence points: the sanctity of life, proper appropriation of justice, expression of gratitude for life, healthy living, and understanding the social context of the pronouncements. With this, a social communication model for the Parish Church was recommended, which other parishes may employ.

EXECUTION OF PEASANT REBELS AND RURAL HOSTAGES IN TAMBOV PROVINCE 1918-1921

The article examines the practice of using the supreme punishment - execution, used by the repressive bodies of the Soviet government in the fight against peasant protests in the Tambov province during the civil war. The research was carried out on the basis of archival sources introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The work uses historical-comparative and systemic methods. An analysis of the facts of the execution of peasants carried out by punitive agencies during the suppression of rural "riots" of 1918-1919 and the period of the struggle against the uprising of 1920-1921 in the Tambov province is given. The facts of extrajudicial killings in the form of public executions of peasant rebels and hostages from among the civilian population, which were resorted to by the military-party administration in the occupied regions, were established. The role of the institution of hostages as a repressive measure in the actions of government troops to suppress the peasant uprising has been clarified. It is concluded that if during the period of rural "riots" in 1918-1919 execution was applied only to their organizers, then during the peasant uprising of 1920-1921 this form of the death penalty for "active" insurgents was given a systemic character, and the shooting of hostages from among local residents became widespread.

I Will Kill You and Nothing Will Happen: Extra-Judicial Killings in Nigeria and Public Interest Litigation

Abstract Public interest litigation is a mechanism of intervention in a matter that concerns the public. It could be about human rights, government policy, or some other issue that could present a challenge to public life. Public interest litigation is important because it presents hope to the powerless and offers justice where there might not previously have been the opportunity. The aim of public interest litigation is to recognise injustice and give a voice to the concerns of members of society who might not have the means to articulate them. In Nigeria there is a high tendency for people of low socioeconomic status to experience police brutality, or even become victims of extra-judicial killing. In this article, it was argued that although public interest litigation is a good strategy to engage the injustice of extra-judicial killings, the recurrence shows that the solution lies more in addressing a systemic problem.

The Media and Race in the Trump Era: An Analysis of Two Racially Different Newsrooms’ Coverage of Blm and Daca

Journalists play a part in the public’s perception of issues through priming, framing, and agenda setting media effects (McCombs, 2014; Power et al., 1996; Quinsaat, 2014), because they serve as a conduit of information. Professional norms dictate how journalists do their newswork; however, implicit biases and the media’s systematic structure can influence common journalistic practices, which can further stereotype marginalized populations (Entman & Rojecki, 2000). This study examines how two structurally different newsrooms covered the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). By sampling content from the Tampa Bay Times, a predominantly White newsroom, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a more diverse newsroom, a textual analysis of articles written nine months before Donald Trump was elected president to the end of his presidency ascertained differences in word choice, frames, sourcing, and other factors in coverage of BLM and DACA. This study found that the ethnicity of journalists likely influences coverage of Black people and Hispanic/Latino immigrants, that coverage of DACA was more sympathetic, ethical framing grew for BLM stories in the wake of extrajudicial killings of Black and brown individuals in 2020, and that specialized reporting leads to better representation of these two issues.

Law and Order in Postcolonial Racial Cities

This work analyzes two class actions contesting the racial violence of Rio de Janeiro’s state police during operations in majority black neighborhoods, assessing both the narratives and social mobilization denouncing black genocide and the role of legal thinking in deviating or denying racism. The analysis of this case reveals that, on the one hand, spatial, racial and juridical structures - established by the racial colonial project and perpetuating in the legacy of racial slavery - create the conditions for genocidal acts to be produced as a long-lasting process. While on the other hand, legal knowledge sustains the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a specific group, which is fundamental to the crime of genocide. Considering that black genocide results from institutional racism, the conditions allowing it to happen are not just associated with intent. Black genocide is implemented through the normal functioning of justice institutions, as we discuss in the case study. In this context, black death is central to sustaining power relations, normalized by the use of racial stereotypes for the racialization of space, creating zones of dehumanization as criminality. Denialist discourses use this condition in perpetuity, to normalize genocide and extra-judicial killings. Nonetheless, the concept of institutional racism enables us to understand that genocide can also result from day-to-day decisions taken by politicians, legal professionals, and institutions.

Postcolonial Aesthetics and Sensuous Geographies in Aruni Kashyap’s The House with a Thousand Stories

The place is fundamental to our existence; it conforms to the phenomenology of being in the world as we always occupy a place “if not with our minds, then always with our bodies”, to quote Moslund. The role of the senses in knowing the geographies of our existence, form a kind of structuring of space and defining of place. To understand the construction of sensorial-socio-cultural space of Assam at the time of extrajudicial killings that produces a ‘sense of fear’ jeopardizing the everyday negotiations of people inhabit the exceptional zones, this paper takes into account Aruni Kashyap’s debut novel The House with Thousand Stories (2013) that set in Hatimura village of Mayong area and deals with alternate retellings of micro-historical account of Assamese people. The paper dwells upon the artist’s creative response to the Agambenian ‘bare life’ that he associates with ‘bare’ or ‘pure senses’ to cultivate the idea of sensuousness of geography produced through the life stories of people and the interactions between human and non-human beings. Like Manipuri mother’s Naked March in front of Kangla Fort and Irom Sharmila’s sixteen years-long hunger strike that can be looked at as the metaphor for staging the ‘bare life’ against the body polity of the state, the sensual dimension of the geographic experience of Pablo, the narrator of the novel, in the village helps to understand the spaces of difference in the time of conflict.

Reflections on Ben Okri, Goenawan Mohamad, and the 2020 Global Uprisings

The global Black Lives Matter uprisings against police violence prompted by Floyd’s murder were connected to a longer history of transnational Black struggles. As Ben Okri and Goenawan Mohamad and others have suggested, the civil rights and Black Power movements from the 1950s to the 1970s were not confined to US terrain; they were part of a global conjuncture. Protests throughout the Western world highlighted the blood-soaked record of the global color line, coalescing around demands for the official repudiation of the continuing legacies of racial oppression, enslavement, segregation, and empire. In the United States, the Black Lives Matter movement transformed the public conversation in the US about police violence. Caught in the act, Derek Chauvin seemed untroubled at being recorded by a courageous 17-year-old Darnella Frazier. We do not know what he was thinking, but still one recalls those members of lynch mobs posing for photographs during the Jim Crow era. Convinced that he would not be held accountable by a system of state-sanctioned violence, Chauvin appears to have believed that his use of deadly force was justifiable, just as similar extrajudicial killings by police officers of Black people have been upheld by juries and the criminal–legal system. BLM linked the crisis of oppressive policing to longstanding racial inequities in health, housing, employment, and income while insisting on the sanctity of the lives of Black poor, queer, and transgender persons, and persons living with disabilities. Republican-authored laws seeking to wrest autocratic control of education by criminalizing the teaching of race in US history are a craven response to the ways that the global reckoning on racism in 2020 has altered the US political landscape.

“As is” America: Subcontracting freedom

AbstractObjectiveThis study examines the nature and uses of the Constitution as a social contract. America's original agreement with its Black citizens, under the three—fifths clause of the Constitution, is one of commodification. The Constitution constructs the Black body as expendable property in a subcontract. Police protect and serve in maintaining this status quo.MethodsThis research analyzes the literature on the social contract theory. This paper compares classical theorists such as Locke, Rawls, and Nozick with opposing literature from Rousseau, Mills, and Pateman. This comparison highlights what many consider “just” as a thinly veiled attempt to justify the legality of the state's actions. Also, there is a review of Graham v. Oconnor to determine how case law upholds the subjugation of Black bodies as part of the subcontract.ResultsMy research suggests that Black citizens are only entitled to the rights and privileges of a subcontract. This subcontract allows for the harassment, unequal treatment, and in some instances, the death of marginalized groups by police at any time.ConclusionFrom the extrajudicial killing of Amadou Diallo to that of Breonna Taylor, it is evident from the past two decades that Black lives are expendable; police officers continue to enforce the fugitive slave clause, which allows for punishment by death for the assumption of criminal behavior. My research helps illuminate the relationship between the Black experience and police encounters as a proxy of a subcontract within the Constitution. These events—the lawless actions of police officers, and a political and legal system that supports these actions—fuel recent waves of the BLM movement.

A feministic critique of Jamil Ahmed’s The Wandering Falcon

The study investigates the novel The Wandering Falcon (2011) by Jamil Ahmad in the milieu of feminist approach. It qualitatively explores the text for the representation of women: the treatment of women by men, and their position in the patriarchal society. The novel is analysed by employing De-Beauvoir’s (1949) feministic philosophical approach in The Second Sex. This research explores the way power is exercised over women in the novel and the suppression of women by men plays as an instrument of transmission of customs and traditions. This research is to explore the novel from a feministic perspective to unveil the hidden realities in the novel regarding women to find out what sort of oppression is faced by women in the novel and to explore the general problems of women in the novel. It is found that in the context of the novel, women are treated unjustly by men. They are deprived of their rights and are taken as commodities in the patriarchal society. Women are stereotypically presented as having no identity, no freedom, and no voice of their own. Being treated as objects and things to be traded by men, women in the novel are found facing domestic violence, sexual objectification, and extra judicial killings.

Reign of terror: A review of police brutality on Nigerian youth by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS)

ABSTRACT Few days after Nigeria attained the sexagenarian status on October 1, 2020, the country has once again become a subject of unusual discourse both home and abroad. This is due to the protests by disgruntled youths against the activities of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad; a unit of the Nigeria Police Force, which has been accused of brutality, human rights violation, sexual abuse, torture, and extrajudicial killings among others. This study adopts a qualitative approach which draws data from reports of reputable international organisations, juried scholarly articles, working papers, and newspaper articles. The study concludes that the police adopts brutality, abuse, and violations as its tactics due to its inadequate equipment for investigation which makes officers deploy torture as a means of extracting the truth. This is further complicated by an ingrained culture of corruption, inadequate funding, political interference, inadequate personnel, and a pro-elite orientation. As a result, it is recommended that a sincere and comprehensive reform of the police be carried out to improve the welfare of the police; encourage the use of extensive technology, and improve police-community relations.

From stage to street: The #Endsars protest and the prospects of street theatre

Globally, the issues of extrajudicial killings are on the increase. From racial killings in the West to wanton human rights violations in Africa, the pains are the same. Thus, protests has always been a channel employed by many including activists, labour and union leaders among others, to press home grievances and demands against unfavourable policies and social malaise. This paper draws attention to how youths in Nigeria utilised the physical space to spark a protest, in October 2020. Notable actors, musicians, comedians, activists and the international community in their numbers, moved to the street in defiance of security orders to protest against police brutality and harassment. In view of the outcome of the protest, which was later hijacked by hoodlums, the paper examines a non-violent alternative which can be used to address societal issues. It is in this context that the paper examined the role of theatre as a tool for activism, advocacy and communication with specific reference to street theatre, a type of improvised street drama performance that addresses unfavourable socio-political and cultural issues. The data for the study is obtained mainly from the internet, print media, observations, interviews and literary works. For its methodology, the study utilises the popular theatre approach. The study concludes that street theatre has a major role to play in addressing socio- political issues without resorting to violence.

How social inequality begets social instability in Northern Nigeria

In the north of Nigeria, the traditional hegemony has built an enduring multifaceted system of oppression that the local politicians maintain and benefit from. In this context, social exclusion and institutional stratification corelate to each other in describing a system of hegemony that is especially designed to deprive millions of people the basic needs in life, conditioning a large army of youths to a hapless and hopeless social underclass. Social instability herein vividly depicts break down of social order, separatist movements in all the three main regions of the country, terrorism, extrajudicial killings, human kidnapping for ransoms, broad day atrocities, most of which are all too familiar even to the outside world. Additionally, the conditions of living in northern Nigeria, best described as gro- tesque poverty and inequality has attracted a lot of research work in different fields of social sciences both within and outside the country. It has been observed that the theories and explanations proffered on the issue have not provided any significant solution, therefore there is a need for interdisciplinary approach. To achieve this objective, the authors have taken the perspectives of economic sociology for a critical and analytical approach by employing novel tools to detect asymmetries of systems of social institutions and their concrete relationship with a range of social outcomes. Thus, it has become possible to detect those asymmetries and the concrete ways they influence the extant institutions. Further still, this work explores the inequality problems by making a careful appraisal of the intrinsic relationships inherent of structures and agents, their contributions to social instabilities in the north of the country. The authors used combined methods of primary observation and secondary data to allow a cursory look into how social inequality underlies social instability now too ubiquitous in northern Nigeria.  Key words: poverty, social inequality, instability, northern Nigeria. &nbsp

A Philippine Asphyxia

My eighty-seven-year-old father cuts holes in his masks. He says he can’t breathe otherwise. The fabric—whether stretchy, cotton, or woven—keeps him from taking full breaths, he protests. When we’re out, he pulls his mask below his nose, irreverent about public health guidance. His breathing, iyan ang kailangan (that’s what’s needed), COVID-19 be damned.He was in Quezon City, Philippines, at the time of the first round of global coronavirus lockdowns. The numbers did not abate with the summer heat, and neither did the extrajudicial killings the present-day Philippine president rains on the populace. My father lived alone and preferred it that way. Until he couldn’t. The people he saw regularly—the buko (coconut) vendor, the titinda ng saging (banana salesperson), the labandera (laundrywoman) who helped with his weekly washing—retreated indoors to avoid the contagion. Local officials delivered cans of sardines to his apartment door. A service for the elderly, they recited.But the loneliness crawled insidiously. The man I had known to be a good-humored storyteller, the man who knew his body organ by organ, withered. The weeks in quarantine took his mind, his sense of time, and his safety. He suspected that others entered his room to move his papers, to steal his wall calendar, to hide his glasses, and to dirty his masks. “This is like martial law,” he’d repeat to me through the phone. “But before, I could be at a beer garden during the curfew of Marcos,” he’d add. My dad lived through the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship and stayed at bars to enjoy the “curfew special” if he didn’t make it home in time. But during the Marcos era authorities also quietly entered my dad’s home, confiscating books he had acquired in the People’s Republic of China during a medical botany research trip. Nothing was upturned, my dad recalled. The air was only made strange by the presence of unknown parties.Decades later the strange air loomed again. He couldn’t breathe indoors—his apartment felt too stuffy, without oxygen, fatiguing. But he couldn’t escape for relief, either. “They come in when I leave,” he swore after changing the locks for a third time. Manila public health policies were especially “protective of” senior citizens, “for their own good,” authorities would recite. Yet the curfew mandate emerged as a haunting reminder of martial law—and the real threat of President Rodrigo Duterte’s declaring it.I traveled from California to the Philippines because my father begged for reprieve. “Please, take me from here, anak (child),” he wept through the phone. I came to him because he needed rescue from the suffocation of quarantine, of scattered memory. To write that the Philippine lockdown had left a shell of a man is to understate his condition. He was sunken flesh, the sardines untouched. The wall calendar beneath his mattress, his glasses stored in a hidden pocket, his cash in crevices he wanted others to find to fund his cremation.Our story isn’t uncommon. Colleagues have moved aging kin into their homes, rushed them to hospitals, facilitated their transition to better-equipped facilities that could help them breathe easier. They console relatives, whose memories of war, crisis, and dictatorship have been agitated. So I weigh risks daily: What will bring peace to my father’s hours, ease the distressing recollections? What will inflict the least negative public health impact but also slow his dementia? What will return his sense of self—his dignity—even if he is “high risk”?My father now lives with me in Oakland. He cuts holes in his masks, COVID-19 be damned. The blood has returned to his skin. He doesn’t speak cyclically of curfews. He sits in the sun, he eats, he weaves tales. He breathes, fearless.

“I held on to the police’s leg for mercy”: Experiences of adversity, risk and harm among people who inject drugs during an anti-drug drive in Dhaka, Bangladesh

BackgroundA number of countries across Asia have instituted “drug wars”, aimed at eradicating drug supply and consumption. These wars often employ strategies like arbitrary arrest and detention, increased surveillance, harassment and sometimes extrajudicial killings. However, these measures have not been shown to effectively eliminate drug supply and consumption; rather they often predispose people who use drugs to increased risk and harm. Such a drug war was declared in the form of an anti-drug drive (ADD) in Bangladesh in 2018. This article examined the impact of the ADD on drug injecting activities and harm reduction service uptake among people who inject drugs (PWID). MethodsAn ethnographic study was conducted in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Study participants included PWID, harm reduction service providers and other drug and alcohol experts. Data collection consisted of 2500 hours of observations, 25 in-depth interviews, five focus group discussions and 15 key informant interviews. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. ResultsADD operations and activities subjected PWID to multifaceted forms of violence and harassment including extrajudicial killings, which significantly affected drug procurement and drug using practices and led to increased needle and syringe sharing and a likely increase in HIV transmission. The gradual disappearance of established drug markets, alongside the emergence of new ones at alternate locations, resulted in the dislocation of PWID from outreach services and further increased risky injecting practices such as needle and syringe sharing between new and unfamiliar injecting partners. These harms were compounded by unpredictable drug supply and price increases stemming from the ADD, which in turn also increased needle and syringe sharing. Harm reduction outreach services were not able to adequately adapt to the volatile, dynamic and risky nature of the ADD. ConclusionThe ADD not only precipitated risky injecting practices but also hindered the effective implementation of harm reduction outreach services and thus undermined public health. This warrants concerted efforts to nurture local evidence-based harm reduction approaches as opposed to punitive measures.

Archaeological Evidence of Gender Differences in Violent Repression

This article discusses women who were either executed by military firing squad or killed extrajudicially during the Spanish Civil War and the Franocist dictatorship, based on evidence from the scientific exhumation of common graves in the twenty-first century. The evidence sheds light on an aspect of Francoist repression that previously has received little attention from scholars and for which few written sources are available, in contrast to executions and killings of men. Archaeological and forensic studies have documented the circumstances of how the women in the graves died, revealing differences between military executions and how extrajudicial killings were conducted. A comparison with findings from male remains found in common graves reveals gendered differences in materiality and in how victims were treated before, during and after death.

Duterte’s Violent Populism: Mass Murder, Political Legitimacy and the “Death of Development” in the Philippines

ABSTRACT Among contemporary illiberal populist leaders, only Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has instigated mass murder under the guise of a “war on drugs.” Attributed to “penal populism,” it must be explained why Duterte won the presidency despite limited concerns about crime, why he organised extra-judicial killings and why this continued despite domestic and international criticism. As president, Duterte nationalised the violent populism he had first developed locally which wooed rather than intimidated voters with promises to protect “good people” against drug-induced evil. His appeals resonated given the failures of liberal reformism and with a proletarian populist alternative undermined. Using nationalism to respond to global criticism, he put opponents on the defensive. Breaking with the left, he has not undertaken major socio-economic reforms and his anti-oligarchy rhetoric benefitted his cronies. Despite killing tens of thousands and revelations of police corruption, as a legitimation strategy Duterte’s drug war has successfully diverted attention from the “death of development” with poverty levels high despite rapid growth. The Philippine case shows extreme dichotomisation of “good people” and criminalised “others” can legitimate mass killings with a populist breakthrough in a weak state with a poor record of human development.

Causes, consequences and control of student protests

This study investigated the causes, consequences and control of student protests, especially the EndSARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad) protest. A descriptive survey was adopted for the study. A total of 600 undergraduates, selected by multi-stage sampling, participated in the study. Three research questions were raised and a questionnaire titled Causes, Consequences and Control of Youth Protest Questionnaire (CCCYPQ) was used to collect data. The findings showed that the protest was caused by extra-judicial killings, assaults, harassment, extortion, bad governance, and youth unemployment. In addition, the findings indicated that the consequences of the protest include destruction of lives and property, hacking of the websites of public ministries, departments, agencies and corporate organizations, destruction of public infrastructural facilities, and disruption of academic activities in schools. The various control measures include disbandment of SARS, compensation for victims of police brutality, and provision of skills acquisition programmes and employment opportunities for youths. There were no significant gender differences in the perceived causes, consequences and control of the protest. Based on the findings, it was recommended that dialogue and collaborative decision-making should be employed in controlling student protest.

Sexual Violence against Women, the Laws, the Punishment, and Negotiating the Duplicity

On 16 December 2012, India erupted in national outrage against the rape of a 23-year-old female student in New Delhi, christened “Nirbhaya” (fearless). In the aftermath, there was a convergence of multiple discourses that framed post-independent India’s feminist consciousness. In 2020, four men convicted of Nirbhaya’s rape and murder were executed. An eight-year old girl in Kashmir was brutally raped and murdered in January 2018. The trial court sentenced the main accused to life in prison. In December 2019, four men held in yet another horrific rape and death of a 27-year veterinarian in Hyderabad were killed by the police in what has been called an extrajudicial killing. More recently, in 2020, a 19-year old was raped and killed in rural Uttar Pradesh. The victims came from different social locations, castes, tribes, and religious communities. This paper presents a feminist critique of the legal discourse on rape and the death penalty. It looks at an ironical cooptation of the critique of sexual violence by a patriarchal discourse on social injury and collective conscience. The paper examines how fleeting rage against the culprits and the call for death penalty immunizes larger misogynist cultural assumptions. This myopic rage is oblivious to sexual violence in women’s daily lives. Finally, the paper looks at why legal reforms triggered by brutal acts of sexual violence, receiving widespread media attention, fail to achieve systemic societal changes.