A plea has been filed in the Supreme Court seeking direction to the Centre to frame guidelines to compensate victims, subjected to wrongful prosecutions, and implement the recommendations that were submitted by the Law Commission in 2018.
On November 30, 2017, the Delhi High Court, directed the Law Commission of India to undertake a comprehensive examination of the issue of relief and rehabilitation to victims of wrongful prosecution and incarceration. “The Law Commission submitted its Report No 277 on August 30, 2018, but the Centre has not taken appropriate steps to implement the recommendations,” the plea said.
The plea, filed by advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, contended that there are many startling cases that show the gross abuse of power and authority by the state and vexatious complainants, which caused absolute “miscarriage of justice”.
Arguing that failure of justice causes irreparable damage to the right to life, liberty and dignity of innocent citizens and no relief is given by the courts.
Citing the National Crime Records Bureau’s annual statistical report titled Prison Statistics India (PSI), the plea said according to PSI 2015, there were 4,19,623 prisoners across the country out of which 67.2 per cent were under trial- substantially higher than the convict population 1,34,168 (32 per cent).
“A review of the data in PSI shows that across the country as well as in states, under trial prisoners continue to be higher in numbers than the convict population. The states with the highest percentage of undertrials were Meghalaya – 91.4 per cent, Bihar – 82.4 per cent, Manipur – 81.9 per cent, Jammu & Kashmir – 81.5 per cent, Nagaland – 79.6 per cent, Odisha – 78.8 per cent, Jharkhand 77.1 per cent, and Delhi – 76.7 per cent,” it said.
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Rushda Fathima Khan is the Staff Reporter for The Cognate.
