On 7 August 2023, the Supreme Court held that 'custody' under Section 167(2) CrPC covers agencies beyond the police — including the ED — that the 15-day custody ceiling runs across the whole 60/90-day investigation, and that a writ of habeas corpus cannot short-circuit a magistrate's remand once Section 19 PMLA is complied with. A digest of the cash-for-jobs custody ruling, the hospitalisation episode, and the reference on Anupam Kulkarni.
Two connected Supreme Court decisions remade prisoners' rights in India. Batra I (1978) read down solitary confinement and bar fetters under the Prisons Act 1894; Batra II (1979/1980) treated a prisoner's letter as a habeas corpus petition and laid down protective directives against custodial torture. A digest of both, and the principle that Article 21 does not stop at the prison gate.
The Supreme Court's 1994 ruling that the power to arrest and the justification for using it are two different things — and that an arrested person is entitled to have a relative or friend told. A close digest of the safeguards that prefigured D.K. Basu.
On 29 May 2026, a two-judge bench awarded ₹11 lakh in constitutional compensation for 24 days of illegal incarceration after a parole-release order, reiterating the 'obey first, appeal later' principle.
On 28 April 1976, in the depths of the Emergency, a five-judge Constitution Bench held by 4:1 that a person detained under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act could not move habeas corpus because the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 stood suspended by the Presidential Proclamation under Article 359. Justice H.R. Khanna's sole dissent — that life and liberty are not the Constitution's gift to be taken away by it — cost him the Chief Justiceship. Forty-one years later, in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, a nine-judge Bench explicitly overruled the majority and adopted the Khanna dissent as the constitutional position. A digest of the judgment, its setting, the dissent, the supersession, and the doctrine that has supplanted it.