NEWS

The Kalaburagi bench of the high court has said that drawing of the blood sample of an accused to determine the paternity of the child is neither self-incrimination nor violative of Article 20 (3) of the Constitution.

ABOUT ARTICLE 20

• Taken care to safeguard the rights of persons accused of crimes.
• Persons here means the citizens, non-citizens as well as corporations.
• This article cannot be suspended even during an emergency in operation under article 359.
• Constitutes the limitation on the legislative powers of the Union and State legislatures.

COMPONENTS

Ex-Post facto Law

• No person shall be convicted of any offence except for violation of a law in force at the time of the commission of the Act
• Legislature cannot make a law which provides for punishment of acts which were committed prior to the date when it came into force
• New law cannot punish an old act.

Doctrine of Double Jeopardy

• No person shall be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once.
• Aims to avoid harassment, which must be caused for successive criminal proceedings, where the person has committed only one crime.

Self-Incrimination Law

• No person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself.
• Based upon a legal maxim which means that No man is bound to accuse himself.
• Accused is presumed to be innocent till his guilt is proved
• Duty of the prosecution to establish his guilt.

CONCEPTS :

DNA SAMPLING

• Testing used for the purpose of verifying the identity of an unknown person.
• Commonly used in criminal investigations for the purpose of identifying suspects to a crime
• Also common in other areas of law, such as paternity testing.
• Work by extracting a sample of DNA from the suspect under investigation.
• Samples may be obtained by a variety of methods, including fingerprint samples, “swab” samples obtained from inside the cheek, or bodily fluid samples (such as blood).
• The DNA samples are taken directly from the person in question.