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    Justice R Banumathi joins collegium as Gogoi demits office

    Synopsis

    Justice R Banumathi, in the news recently for dealing with P Chidambaram’s bail plea, will be the first woman judge in more than 13 years to be inducted into the Supreme Court collegium, after Ruma Pal. As part of the collegium, she will have a say in all appointments to the top court, which has only had eight woman judges since Independence.

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    Justice R Banumathi will be the first woman judge in more than 13 years to be inducted into the Supreme Court collegium.
    New Delhi: Justice R Banumathi, in the news recently for dealing with P Chidambaram’s bail plea, will be the first woman judge in more than 13 years to be inducted into the Supreme Court collegium.

    She will replace outgoing chief justice Ranjan Gogoi. Ruma Pal was the last woman member of the collegium.

    SA Bobde will be sworn in as the chief justice of India on Monday, succeeding Gogoi. Banumathi’s induction will also take place on Monday. As part of the collegium, she will have a say in all appointments to the top court, which has only had eight woman judges since Independence.

    Banumathi is the first woman judge from Tamil Nadu and was chief justice of the Jharkhand High Court. As a Madras High Court judge, she had banned the traditional jallikattu sport in the state that had been challenged by animal rights activists as being “cruel.”

    She had recused herself from hearing the case in the top court.

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    In the Madras High Court, Banumathi also handled the so-called godman Premananda’s case, sentencing him to two life terms for the rape and murder of women in his ashram.

    While hearing the bail pleas of Chidambaram in the Supreme Court, she had rejected the prosecution’s contention that the latter was likely to flee the country, granting him bail in the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) case related to allegations of bribery in the INX Media case. Chidambaram is still in custody in the Enforcement Directorate (ED) case.

    She’s among a handful of top judges who have disclosed their assets.

    Banumathi was recently part of a nine-judge bench that refused to re-examine the top court’s twin rulings that established and institutionalised the collegium system.

    Known for her adroit handling of criminal cases, she was part of a bench with former chief justice Dipak Misra that rejected the Nirbhaya rape accused’s review pleas and confirmed an earlier 2017 ruling on their death sentence.

    She recently dealt with another politically sensitive case involving a law student who accused Uttar Pradesh Bharatiya Janata Party leader Swami Chinmayananda of raping her.


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