Landmark Judgments on Criminal Justice Reforms (NET Unit V)

Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966), held that the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination requires police to warn a suspect, before any custodial interrogation, of the right to remain silent, that anything said can be used against them, and the right to an attorney, appointed free of charge if they cannot afford one.

A confession taken without this warning is presumed compelled and inadmissible at trial. The ruling made the warning a precondition for using its fruits in court rather than banning interrogation outright.

D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal, (1997) 1 SCC 416, responded to deaths and injuries in Indian police lockups going uninvestigated for want of an independent record. The Supreme Court held that custodial torture violates the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 and issued eleven binding requirements, including a witness-attested arrest memo, information to a relative or friend of the arrestee, and medical examination at arrest and every 48 hours thereafter.

Comparable safeguards were later written into Sections 36 to 38 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, which replaced the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 for proceedings begun on or after 1 July 2024. For NET purposes, remember the mechanism contrast: Miranda controls what happens to unwarned evidence after the fact, while D.K. Basu mandates a paper trail at the moment of arrest.

Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), held that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel is a fundamental right, incorporated against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, and that an indigent defendant in a felony trial must be provided a lawyer at state expense.

The ruling created the modern American public defender system. India reached a similar destination through Article 39A (added by the Forty-Second Amendment, 1976), which directs the state to provide free legal aid, and through the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987, which created the National Legal Services Authority.

Hussainara Khatoon v. State of Bihar (1979 AIR 1369) exposed thousands of undertrial prisoners in Bihar detained longer than the maximum sentence for their alleged offence, without trial ever beginning.

The Supreme Court held that the right to a speedy trial is part of the fair, just and reasonable procedure guaranteed under Article 21, ordered the release of undertrials already detained beyond the maximum sentence, and tied this right to free legal aid, since an unrepresented poor accused cannot meaningfully exercise a right to speedy trial.

Section 479 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, later gave a first-time undertrial who has served one-third of the maximum sentence an entitlement to release on bond, extending the release logic Hussainara Khatoon first articulated.

Habeas corpus is an order compelling whoever holds a person in custody to produce that person before a court and justify the detention in law.

In India it is available under Articles 32 and 226 of the Constitution, letting the Supreme Court and the High Courts order the release of anyone detained without lawful authority. Its limits were tested during the Emergency of 1975 to 1977, when the Supreme Court in ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla (1976) held, by a four-to-one majority, that the right to move courts for habeas corpus could itself be suspended during a proclaimed Emergency.

The Court reversed this position decades later in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), which overruled ADM Jabalpur and affirmed that the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 cannot be treated as extinguished even during an Emergency. For NET purposes, this pair of cases is the standard example of the Supreme Court overturning its own earlier constitutional interpretation, restoring habeas corpus as an unconditional check rather than one the executive can suspend.

NET objective questions on this bullet typically pair a case name with either its holding or the right it interprets. The safest recall strategy is a three-part anchor for each case: the right at stake (Article 21 for custodial and speedy-trial cases, Article 39A read with Article 21 for legal aid), the specific procedural fix the Court ordered, and whether that fix was later codified into statute.

Two traps recur in this bullet. First, do not confuse a case that declares a right (Hussainara Khatoon on speedy trial) with one that prescribes an administrative procedure to enforce it (D.K. Basu's eleven requirements). Second, do not assume every judicial guideline discussed here has been repealed by the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023; the statute mostly codified existing judicial guidelines rather than replacing them, so the case remains good law alongside the statute.