Legal aid for undertrials not released within a week of getting bail: Top court
The top court sought to put in place a digital mechanism to ensure undertrials granted bail are given legal recourse automatically after a week.
An undertrial who remains in prison for more than a week after being granted bail will be accorded recourse from the district legal services authority to ensure their release, the Supreme Court has said, as it put in place a mechanism to guarantee aid in such cases.
A bench of justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and AS Oka, in an order passed on Tuesday, said, “If the accused is not released within a period of seven days from the date of grant of bail, it would be the duty of the jail superintendent to inform the secretary, DLSA, who may depute a para legal volunteer or jail-visiting advocate to interact with and assist the prisoner in all ways possible for his release.” The direction came after a suo motu petition.
Acting on a set of recommendations by the National Legal Service Authority (NALSA), which said that 5,000 undertrials across India remain behind bars despite being granted bail, the bench issued a slew of directions to ease the release of such prisoners. The data was collected by NALSA after receiving information from all state legal service authorities.
The top court sought to put in place a digital mechanism to ensure undertrials granted bail are given legal recourse automatically after a week.
The bench directed jail superintendents to register the date of an undertrial or convicts’ bail order on software maintained by the prison. It also told the National Informatics Centre (NIC), which provides e-prison software to 1,300 jails, to integrate bail order and release order dates in the software, information that superintendents will be required to enter.
In the event the prisoner is not released within seven days, the bench said, “The e-prison software will automatically generate a flag/reminder and simultaneously the e-mail would be sent to the office of the concerned DLSA so that the DLSA can find out the reason for non-release of the accused.”
NALSA, through its counsel Gaurav Agrawal, told the court that one of the primary reasons prisoners remain behind bars despite bail is because they are accused in several cases and are “not willing to furnish bail bonds till they get bail in all the matters”.
The court directed the lower courts to not to be too strict on insisting on local surety and to be flexible in modifying bail bond conditions.
The bench said, “One of the reasons which delays the release of the accused/ convict is the insistence upon local surety. It is suggested that in such cases, the courts may not impose the condition of local surety.” This suggestion by NALSA was converted into an order.
