SC to consider plea for guidelines to check custodial crimes

The Supreme Court has agreed to consider a PIL for laying down guidelines to ensure an effective framework to prevent custodial torture, deaths and rapes, in the wake of alleged killings of the father-son duo in police custody in Tamil Nadu's Thoothukudi district.

A bench of Chief Justice S A Bobde and Justices A S Bopanna and V Ramasubramanian referred the plea by NGO 'People's Charioteer Organisation' and advocate Devesh Saxena for consideration before a bench headed by Justice U U Lalit.

The matter came up for consideration before the court on Friday.

The petition, drawn by advocate Shashwat Anand, sought a direction to the Union Government to form an independent committee of members from all the relevant departments and ministries to review the entire legal framework and find pitfalls to curb the menace.

The petitioner claimed that the recent incidents of custodial crimes have traumatised all those who respect the rule of law and personal liberty in the country.

"It is noteworthy to mention here that Indian police are well known for gratuitous beatings, custodial torture, custodial deaths, fake encounters and other blatant state violence...we failed to eliminate the colonial attitude of our police and allowed it to continue with same archaic law such as the Police Act, 1861," it claimed.

The murderous police assault, unending beatings and brutal torture, which caused the death of two innocent traders, a father and a son, Jayaraj, aged 62 years and Bennix, aged 32 years in June 2020, at Sathankulam Police Station, near Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu, has brought the issue of custodial deaths to the limelight, the petitioner said.

"It underlines afresh the urgent need for institutional correctives within the policing system in this country and the acute need for Union government to enact a strong law to prohibit and prosecute cases of torture and custodial deaths, in fulfilment of its legal obligations, both national and international, to guarantee protection to the right to life," it said.

The petitioner cited the Law Commission's 152nd and 273rd reports, as well as other committee reports along with statues of the foreign jurisdiction to buttress its points. It also cited the NHRC's report between 1994-95 to 2017-18 which enlisted the number of death and rapes in judicial custody and police custody as 29979 and 3642 respectively.