The State government has preferred writ appeals before the Madras High Court against a single judge’s much-acclaimed verdict that public servants and constitutional functionaries cannot be allowed to misuse the law of criminal defamation by using the State as a tool to initiate defamation proceedings against their adversaries.
Justice Abdul Quddhose passed the judgment on May 21 this year while quashing a number of criminal defamation proceedings initiated against a host of Editors, publishers and journalists by the erstwhile Jayalalithaa government.
“The State cannot use criminal defamation cases to throttle democracy,” he observed in his common judgment on the batch of cases.
Now, preferring writ appeals against select respondents who included S. Selvam of DMK’s official organ Murasoli and Sunil Nair, former Resident Editor of The Times of India, Chennai, the government…