The Supreme Court has done well to tell the government to come up with a plan to release from prisons undertrials and those convicted of minor offences to mark 75 years of Independence. A bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and M M Sundresh proposed that prisoners who have been in jail for 10 years be released on bail and those who have been in jail for 14 years be considered for remission. It also said that prisoners from poor economic backgrounds should be particularly considered for release and made a suggestion for developing a uniform remission policy. The court’s view that inmates of prisons should ideally be let out on bail if the judiciary cannot decide their cases within 10 years is not new. But no serious attempt has been made to make it a policy.
The nation will celebrate its attainment of freedom on Monday, and it will be appropriate that people who have been robbed of their freedom should be released from jail on that day. Many of the undertrial prisoners in jails waste a good part of their lives in jail, and as the court remarked, a person cannot get his life back if he is finally exonerated. Many prisoners are unable to afford the services of lawyers and others are unaware of the legalities and procedures involved. There are many prisoners who may have committed only minor offences or perhaps no offence at all. Life in jail might turn some of them into hardened criminals. It is not the fault of the prisoners if the justice system is unable to decide the cases in time, and they should not be made to pay a price for the system’s fault with their lives. Speedy justice is the right of every citizen.
The court also underlined the need to adhere to the reformative theory of justice, which aims to integrate prisoners with society. The court’s suggestion is also important in the context of the long pendency of cases in courts and the clogging of jails with undertrials. The top court has called for the release of undertrials many times in the past. It has laid down bail norms also. Prime Minister Modi recently talked about the need to speed up the release of undertrial prisoners. Many countries release prisoners on important national occasions. India has also done it as a token gesture and in limited numbers. The government should take the court’s advice and release undertrials and prisoners who have committed minor crimes in a grand gesture befitting the occasion of Independence Day. It will be a humanitarian decision in the spirit of freedom.