Judicial Inquiry Into a Custodial Death or an Encounter

In one line

When a person dies at the hands of the police, the inquiry is not by a Commission and not by a judge of a superior court but by a magistrate, under a procedure the Supreme Court has laid down in sixteen requirements binding as law declared under article 141.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: in People's Union for Civil Liberties v. State of Maharashtra, (2014) 10 SCC 635, the Supreme Court issued sixteen requirements as the standard procedure for a thorough, effective and independent investigation of police encounters causing death, including that a magisterial inquiry under section 176 of the Code must invariably be held in all cases of death occurring in the course of police firing and a report sent to the Judicial Magistrate having jurisdiction under section 190, and directed that they be strictly observed in all cases of death and grievous injury in police encounters, treating them as law declared under article 141.

Why this belongs in a chapter on judicial inquiries

Every inquiry so far in this module has been extraordinary. A Committee under the Judges (Inquiry) Act sits perhaps once in a decade. A Commission of Inquiry is appointed for a matter of public importance and reports years later.

An inquiry into a custodial death is the opposite: it is routine, it is compulsory, and it happens in a magistrate's court. It is the form of judicial inquiry a lawyer is far more likely to meet than any other, and it is the form in which the idea of this whole paper, a control on maladministration, does its most urgent work: the administration has killed someone, and somebody who is not the administration must find out how.

And note what makes it judicial. Not the seniority of the person inquiring, but that an officer exercising judicial power, independent of the police, inquires into what the police did.

The facts, and the route to the Supreme Court

Writ petitions in the Bombay High Court sought particulars of persons killed in police encounters in Maharashtra; the registration of offences under section 302 of the Penal Code against officers prima facie responsible; a report from the Coroner of Mumbai; an inquiry into all encounters in the State; the constitution of the State Human Rights Commission under the Protection of Human Rights Act 1993; and guidelines governing the planning and carrying out of encounters for the protection of life and liberty under article 21 read with article 14.

The High Court framed guidelines, and the matter came up on appeal, with the High Court's guidelines, the petitioner's suggestions and the National Human Rights Commission's own guidelines all before the Court, together with affidavits of the Union, the States and the Union Territories, whose views the Court records were not uniform.