Why a Jharkhand HC’s Custodial Death Verdict Could Become a Landmark for India
This could be a great model for every state where custodial deaths go un-investigated and families go uncompensated.
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A Jharkhand High Court has recently flagged 427 custodial deaths in the state since 2018, ordering a judicial inquiry into the matter. The judgment by shines a ray of hope for hundreds of victims' families who long awaited the justice system to keep up to its Constitutional promise. A promise that has rarely been delivered in custodial violence cases across the country.
The Mumtaz Ansari verdict must be mapped in the larger canvas of international pushback, failure of domestic mechanisms, and the consistent clarion call for custodial accountability in India.
Amongst prior rulings that either directed systemic reforms without reaching individual victims, or delivered justice to one family without systemic overhaul, this judgment is a pioneer, and stands unique by promising to deliver systemic reforms and collective justice to hundreds of victims.
A Crisis of Accountability
As early as 2016, Human Rights Watch came out with a staggering report on custodial torture in India, which highlighted the contradiction between the enormous instances of custodial deaths and very few to no convictions of police officers, marking the State's failure to meet the gap in accountability.
Almost 10 years later, the World Organisation Against Torture categorised India as a "high-risk" country in its Global Torture Index. Another International report revealed that the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) received a total of 20,000 complaints of custodial deaths between 2014 and 2022, with a prosecution rate of zero.
India lacks an anti-torture law and has not ratified the Convention Against Torture since 1997, despite repeated promises and the NHRC’s recommendation around the early 2000s. Several International bodies, including the UN Human Rights Committee, have been urging India to address this issue by enacting an anti-torture law and introducing institutional reforms, but in vain.
This year alone, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture made several attempts to urge the government to act, including her remarks at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, a joint letter to the Indian government and her recommendations during a civil society consultation last week. Despite all this, the government exhibits absolute impunity, culminating in international and local failure of human rights accountability in India.
Reforms without Remedy
It would be unfair to say that the judiciary has done nothing so far. A few weeks ago, The Quint reported the historic verdict in the Sathankulam custodial death case. But it doesn’t extend much beyond the individual remedy to create systemic change and collective justice for past victims, as much as its symbolic value.
The Supreme Court has delivered several verdicts to create systemic reforms, including the setting up of CCTV cameras in police stations and the creation of a police complaints authority (PCA) for police accountability. However, both CCTVs and PCAs suffer from a serious implementation crisis, which leaves the accountability gap intact.
The Apex Court, even as early as 1999, has been stating that custodial violence “strikes a blow at the rule of law”, but has it really been translated into systemic change and justice for victims? At this juncture comes the Jharkhand HC decision, which is compelling and reassuring for more than one reason: the rhetorical value, procedural safeguards and reparation to victims.
The Principal Bench of the Jharkhand HC delivered this verdict in a Public Interest Litigation, predicated upon the government data revealing 427 custodial deaths in the state between 2018 and 2026, more than half denied the independent judicial inquiry the law mandated.
The petition prompted the court to uphold constitutional morale, enforce procedural guarantees, and deliver collective justice. The court was very clear about its language from the beginning of the verdict. It asserted that the victims are ‘marginalised and socio-economically weaker sections of society’ who lack the financial and legal resources to pursue their rights against the ‘state machinery’.
Procedural Violation and Constitutional Failure
At the heart of the judgment lies a statutory violation of section 176(1-A) of the CrPC, inserted by Parliament in 2006 following the Law Commission's 152nd Report of 1994, which clarified that custodial death inquiry must be conducted by a Judicial Magistrate, not an Executive Magistrate.
The court referred to the Law Commission’s report, which stated that custodial violence, a substantive violation, should be taken over by the procedural safeguard of ensuring a prompt and impartial inquiry.
The earlier arrangement, which allowed executive magistrates to investigate custodial deaths, was inherently erroneous, as it placed the inquiry within the same executive framework it was designed to oversee. ‘Both the inquiring officer and the personnel whose conduct was under scrutiny were functionaries of the same administrative hierarchy, often operating under identical political and bureaucratic pressures.’
The 2006 amendment was a direct legal response to address this conflict of interest, which the Jharkhand government had ignored completely.
The court noted this discrepancy directly, ‘casting serious doubt on the state's veracity.’ This systemic bypass, the court held, violated both Article 21, the right to life cannot be investigated by the very executive responsible for its deprivation, and Article 14, since the arbitrary pick and choose selection of which families received judicial inquiry and which did not introduces unconstitutional caprice into a domain where equality before the law is non-negotiable.
The Court’s Intervention
The remedy was path-breaking; ‘de novo’ inquiries ordered across all 262 cases, retrospective, collective, court-supervised and most importantly, time-bound. The court set a clear deadline and reporting for all the directions it gave.
In addition, the court also directed the judicial academy to prepare Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and a model format for inquiry reports to all judicial officers within four months. The court went a step further and ordered that every inquiry report upon completion must be forwarded to both the NHRC and the Jharkhand State Human Rights Commission, with explicit assurance from the concerned magistrate and Superintendent of Police that the inquiry has complied with the statutory requirement.
As a human rights lawyer from a victim-centred organisation, what appears most striking to me is how quietly, yet revolutionarily, the court delivered reparation for victims.
The court directed that upon receipt of an inquiry report disclosing custodial violence, the District Victim Compensation Committee shall, on its own motion, take up the matter and determine compensation within thirty days, without unnecessarily burdening the victims to approach the court.
A Rare Judicial Breakthrough
As elucidated above, the judgment is novel and path-breaking for many reasons. This is the first verdict by any constitutional court providing a collective remedy to hundreds of custodial death victims for the violation of procedural safeguards. It is also the first case where the court has held a violation of Article 21 along with Article 14 for the pick and choose methodology deployed by the government.
This case could be a great model for every other state where custodial deaths go uninvestigated and families uncompensated. The data needed to replicate this litigation already exists in NHRC annual reports, potential RTI responses from state home departments, and starred questions answered in state legislative assemblies.
While custodial justice has long been a distant dream for victims across India, Mumtaz Ansari shows it is not an impossible one, an exemplary case of strategic litigation for human rights lawyers, and for the hundreds of families who have navigated this dark sea alone, it may finally be the lighthouse they were looking for.
(Edgar Kaiser is a human rights lawyer at People’s Watch and an L.L.M candidate in European and International Human Rights Law at Leiden University, Netherlands. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint does not endorse or is responsible for them.)