Effective, free legal aid and release from prison if half the sentence has been served in pre-trial detention: these are the twin pillars which, according to criminologists and legal experts, form the bulwark of the mechanism for reducing the undertrial population in India. However, a report released on July 12 by the human rights organisation Amnesty International has found that both these twin pillars are gravely plagued by ills. The ratio of legal aid lawyers to the undertrial population is a poor one, the status of lawyers’ visits to jails is abysmal, and a large number of prisoners are wrongly […]
The post Abysmal Legal Aid, Untrained Jail Officials the Bane of Undertrials
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