The Supreme Court has admitted that a 1976 verdict by it on Emergency had violated fundamental rights of a large number of people in the country. A bench of Justices Aftab Alam and Asok Kumar Ganguly in a judgement said, majority decision of a five-member Constitution bench upholding the suspension of fundamental rights during Emergency in the ADM Jabalpur Vs Shivakant Shukla case, 1976 was erroneous. The observation was made by the court, which in an unprecedented move commuted to life imprisonment the death sentence, earlier upheld by it, of a man who murdered four members of a family. The Supreme Court bench said, instances of this court's judgement violating the human rights of the citizens may be extremely rare but it cannot be said that such a situation can never happen. The bench pointed out that in the 4:1 ruling that it was Justice Khanna who rightly gave a dissenting judgement by holding that under clause(8) Article 226 under which the high courts can issue writs of Habeas Corpus is an integral part of the Constitution. It said, no power has been conferred upon any authority in the Constitution for suspending the power of the high court to issue writs in the nature of habeas corpus during the period of emergency. The apex court also recalled the comment of former Chief Justice M N Venkatachalliah in the Khanna Memorial Lecture on February 25, 2009 that the majority decision in the Emergency case be confined to the dustbin of history.