HC directs legal aid lawyers to assist in granting bail to undertrials

A single judge bench of justice Milind Jadhav issued the order after a bail applicant, who was incarcerated for nearly eight years, told the bench that he was not produced in court for over three years.

MUMBAI: The Bombay high court on Friday directed all lawyers on legal aid panels to apprise courts whenever they come across prisoners who had undergone long pre-trial incarceration.

HC directs legal aid lawyers to assist in granting bail to undertrials

A single judge bench of justice Milind Jadhav issued the order after a bail applicant, who was incarcerated for nearly eight years, told the bench that he was not produced in court for over three years.

Justice Jadhav, who was hearing the bail plea of the murder accused, said that it was the duty of the advocates appointed through legal aid authority to move the court and apprise it of such applicants, especially in long incarceration cases of undertrial prisoners.

The court said the case reflected a sorry situation as the right to speedy trial is a fundamental right of every prisoner, as upheld by the Supreme Court in a series of rulings. The court observed that there was precedence in the Bombay high court too, where bail was even granted to prisoners who had suffered pre-trial incarceration of more than a year.

According to the NCRB’s report, Prison Statistics India 2022, Indian prisons had an occupancy rate of 131%, with 5,73,220 inmates against a capacity of 4,36,266. Of this, 4,34,302 are undertrials against whom cases are still pending, amounting to nearly 75.8% of all prisoners across the country. As of December 31, 2022, around 8.6% of all undertrial prisoners had been in prison for more than three years.

The Supreme Court had highlighted the need for comprehensive bail law reforms in the case of Satender Kumar Antil vs CBI, where the Court provided guidelines for timely disposal of bail applications and emphasised the principle of ‘bail, not jail’.