The Indian Express ·
Crime, law and justice
21 years in jail, no trial: Lawyers take up fight for mentally ill Karnataka man
The Karnataka High Court is examining a petition filed by two lawyers on behalf of a prisoner whose case file was found missing and marked as "disposed of" online.
The Karnataka High Court Tuesday took up a petition concerning a mentally ill undertrial prisoner who has been lodged in Bengaluru Central Prison for 21 years without facing a criminal trial.
Hearing the plea, Justice C M Poonacha directed that the Karnataka State Legal Services Authority be made a party respondent to the case and scheduled the next hearing for Thursday. The petition seeks urgent directions to the trial court to immediately trace and release V Srinivasa’s records after his case file was found missing from official records.
Srinivasa was arrested in 2005 by the Kolar rural police for allegedly killing his wife. The trial court denied him bail, and he has remained in custody ever since.
The matter reached the High Court through advocates Vikram Raj A and Ashwin Joyston Kutinha, who took up the case voluntarily for free.
In August, the advocates applied to the Kolar trial court for certified copies of the case records. The Principal District and Sessions Judge returned the application the same day, noting that the file had not been received from the central record room.
Following a September 7 visit to Bengaluru’s Central Prison to meet Srinivasa, the lawyers approached the High Court, arguing that missing files cannot justify denying a prisoner his fundamental liberty.
The petition highlights serious questions over how a case involving a mentally ill undertrial prisoner in custody for over two decades could be handled so carelessly.
“The inability of the trial court to locate the judicial records cannot be a ground to deny the petitioner access to the proceedings concerning his own liberty. The trial court is duty-bound to trace and secure the records and furnish certified copies in accordance with law,” said advocate Ashwin Joyston Kutinha.
Advocate Raj said, “We moved the application in order to ascertain the status of the proceedings and whether the aforesaid safeguards and directions as issued by the Supreme Court in similar cases have been complied with.”
During trial court proceedings in 2005, prison authorities reported Srinivasa’s deteriorating mental health. Based on a medical evaluation from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), the trial court ruled on September 3, 2015, that Srinivasa was of unsound mind and incapable of standing trial.
The trial court stayed all further proceedings and ordered him to be transferred to the psychiatric ward of Central Prison, Bengaluru, or the mental hospital at Dharwad, directing periodic mental health status reports to be filed. That 2015 order remains the last entry on record, even though the e-courts portal currently marks the case status as “disposed of”.
The plea pointed to Supreme Court directives initiated following The Indian Express report in 2005 on Assam’s Machal Lalung, who spent 38 years as an undertrial in a psychiatric ward.
The Supreme Court mandated that mentally ill undertrials charged with serious offences undergo regular medical evaluations, that fitness reports be submitted continuously to the sessions court, and that every such case receive a formal court review at least once every three months.