Twenty-Two Years, No Reliable Evidence: What Arjun Jani Tells Us About Jail Criminal Appeals

A Man, Twenty-Two Years, And No Reliable Evidence

In August 2026, a two-Judge Bench of the Supreme Court — Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice K. Vinod Chandran — did what ought never to have become necessary: it acquitted a man who had already served twenty-two years of a life sentence for a triple murder he did not commit. In Arjun Jani @ Tuntun v. State of Orissa, 2026 INSC 802, the conviction under Section 302 IPC was found to rest on a sole eyewitness “shaky and highly improbable,” a confession extracted by third-degree methods in breach of Section 25 of the Evidence Act, and a “recovery” of weapons that in truth lay in plain sight beside the bodies. The Court recorded that “22 years [were] erased out of a person’s life without any reliable evidence,” and called the outcome a “collective failure” of the system.

But the graver infirmity disclosed by Arjun Jani lies not merely in the wrongful conviction; it is that the appellant came perilously close to never being heard at all. His appeal reached the Orissa High Court late by roughly 3,157 days — almost eight and a half years — and the High Court, instead of opening its doors, shut them, declining to condone the delay and dismissing the appeal without examining the merits. By the time the matter reached the Supreme Court the delay had swollen to about 3,703 days, which a Coordinate Bench by order dated 7 May 2026, condoned while terming the High Court’s approach “very disturbing.” The Court ultimately invoked Article 142 to acquit rather than remit a two-decade-old matter for a hearing that would “serve little practical purpose.”

Arjun Jani is therefore a glaring illustration of a structural truth: for the indigent, illiterate prisoner, the statutory right of appeal and the fundamental right of access to justice are being quietly frustrated — not by a reasoned denial on the merits, but by the invisible machinery of delay, inertia and neglect that stands between the cell and the appellate registry.

The Right That Is Being Frustrated

The right of a convicted person to appeal is not a matter of grace. It is a statutory right under Section 374 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (now Section 415 of the BNSS, 2023), and the Code expressly contemplates the prisoner’s predicament: Section 383 CrPC (now Section 424 BNSS) permits a convict in jail to present his petition of appeal, and the accompanying documents, to the officer-in-charge of the jail, who is duty-bound to forward it to the appellate court. This is the “jail criminal appeal” (JCRLA) — the poor prisoner’s lifeline to the High Court.

Layered above the statute is the constitutional guarantee: the right to appeal and the effective means of exercising it are woven into Articles 21 and 39A. In M.H. Hoskot v. State of Maharashtra, (1978) 3 SCC 544, the Court held that a prisoner is entitled, as part of fair procedure, to a free certified copy of the judgment and to free legal services to prosecute his appeal — for an appeal without counsel and without the judgment is no appeal at all. In Suk Das and Anr vrs Union Territory of Arunachal Pradesh, (1986) 2 SCC 401, and the Hussainara Khatoon vrs State of Bihar 1979 AIR 1369 free legal aid was entrenched as intrinsic to Article 21. The Orissa High Court in Jatia Hembram put it directly: the right to prefer an appeal “can also be construed to be a fundamental right under Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution.”

The chasm lies between this jurisprudence and the lived reality of a barely-literate life convict in a district jail: he seldom knows the appeal period, rarely receives a certified copy of the judgment in time, has no money for counsel and no family to instruct one. The State legal-services machinery, though it exists on paper, often does not reach him for years, if at all. Arjun Jani and Jatia Hembram are two Odisha specimens of that failure, identical in pathology.

Jatia Hembram: The Orissa High Court Builds A Standard Operating Procedure

Even before Arjun Jani reached the Supreme Court, the Orissa High Court had confronted the disease head-on. In JatiaHembram v. State of Odisha, a Division Bench of Justice Sangam Kumar Sahoo and Justice Sibo Sankar Mishra, by order dated 28 November 2025, was “taken aback” that a JCRLA against a 2013 murder conviction had been filed only after a delay of about 4,565 days (over twelve years) — and, damningly, despite regular jail inspections by the District Judge and DLSA officials. The obvious question followed: if the machinery of inspection and legal aid was working, how did a life convict sit for twelve years without his appeal being filed?

The answer took the shape of a standard operating procedure to ensure that no convict’s appeal is lost to time. Its principal directions are: a register of appeals, maintained by the jail and the DLSA, recording for every convict the appeal number, counsel’s name and contact, and the status of interim applications including bail, a copy of which is furnished to the convict himself; verification of privately-arranged appeals, so that an appeal claimed but never instituted cannot slip through the cracks; that where a convict declines to appeal after proper guidance, his refusal must be taken in writing by the DLSA Secretary and forwarded to the Member Secretary of the State Legal Services Authority, with copies retained by the jail; that the District Judge on jail inspection must inform convicts of the right to appeal, ensure JCRLAs are filed within time, and send regular written progress reports to the High Court; and that the DLSA must guide convicts on their statutory and constitutional right to appeal. Crucially, the Bench grounded these directions in first principle — that the right of appeal is itself a facet of the fundamental rights under Articles 14 and 21 — relying on the Supreme Court’s decision in Kamaljit Kaur v. State of Punjab.

Kamaljit Kaur: Consent Must Be Genuine, Refusal Must Be In Writing

The other half of the picture comes from Kamaljit Kaur v. State of Punjab (2025), decided by Justice Pankaj Mithal and Justice Prasanna B. Varale. There, an SLP filed on a convict’s behalf under the NALSA scheme carried a delay of 2,298 days — but the Superintendent of the Central Jail, Kapurthala, deposed that the prisoner had never approached the authorities and was unwilling to appeal at all. The Court held that filing an appeal merely to meet a legal-aid programme’s targets, without the convict’s consent, is a misuse of the process of law, and dismissed the petition on delay.

Kamaljit Kaur is the necessary counterweight to Jatia Hembram. It teaches that a robust mechanism is not a numbers game of mechanically filing appeals to burnish legal-aid statistics; it is about genuine, informed consent. Read together, the two decisions yield the correct rule of prudence: every convict must be counselled and offered an appeal, and either his appeal is filed promptly, or his informed refusal is recorded in writing. There is no lawful third state of limbo — and it is precisely that limbo which swallowed twenty-two years of Arjun Jani’s life.

The Existing Framework: What Already Governs The DLSA And The District Judge

In fairness, this is not a field bereft of regulation. The statutory backbone is the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987: under Section 9, every district has a District Legal Services Authority, and the District Judge is its ex-officio Chairman — so responsibility for legal aid to prisoners already rests, by statute, on the senior-most judicial officer of the district. Upon that base NALSA has built an elaborate framework: the NALSA (Legal Services Clinics) Regulations, 2011, mandating a Prison Legal Aid Clinic in every jail; the NALSA (Legal Services to Prisoners) Scheme; and, most concretely, the NALSA Standard Operating Procedure on Access to Legal Aid Services to Prisoners, 2022 (“SOP-2022”). The Model Prison Manual, 2016 independently obliges the State to furnish free legal aid to needy prisoners and to apprise them of their rights, including the right to appeal, on admission.

This framework has recently been reinforced by binding directions of the Supreme Court. In Suhas Chakma v. Union of India, 2024 INSC 813, decided on 23 October 2024 by Justice B.R. Gavai and Justice K.V. Viswanathan, the Court directed NALSA, the SLSAs and the DLSAs to operate SOP-2022 efficiently, to render the Legal Aid Defence Counsel System fully functional through periodic audits, and to institute a robust awareness mechanism. Most pertinently, it directed the Registry to forward the judgment to all High Courts to consider practice directions for informing convicts of the availability of free legal aid to pursue higher remedies — that is, appeals — and mandated a digitised flow of status reports from the DLSAs to the SLSAs to NALSA.

Oversight of the prison itself is likewise provided for. The DLSA Chairman must inspect each prison’s Legal Aid Clinic quarterly, and in Sukanya Shantha v. Union of India the Court directed every State to constitute, in each district, a Board of Visitors headed by the Principal District Judge. The architecture of legal aid and of judicial oversight, in short, already exists in considerable measure.

And yet Arjun Jani and Jatia Hembram establish, with uncomfortable clarity, that this elaborate framework does not squarely address the one thing that matters to a convict within limitation — the timely filing of his appeal. SOP-2022 is directed chiefly to the functioning of clinics and to legal aid at large; it does not fix an accountable, time-bound procedure guaranteeing that every convict either files within limitation or has his refusal recorded in writing, and that the inspecting judge reports upon the status of each appeal. That is the precise lacuna the Orissa High Court moved to close in Jatia Hembram, while Kamaljit Kaur confirms the correlative safeguard of genuine, recorded consent. The higher judiciary, in sum, no longer treats the prisoner’s appeal as a private lis to be pursued or abandoned at his peril; it treats its filing as an institutional obligation, to be enforced through registers, written records and reported inspections. What remains is to universalise a dedicated jail-appeal-timeliness SOP along the lines of Jatia Hembram

The concern is neither new nor merely judicial. The Model Prison Manual, 2016 obliges the State to provide free legal aid to all needy prisoners and to apprise them, on admission, of their rights including the right to appeal. The National Human Rights Commission, in its recommendations on custodial justice, has pressed for structured mechanisms to secure speedy disposal and effective representation, and has repeatedly flagged prisoners who languish beyond any legitimate period of detention. The Law Commission of India — from its early reports on legal aid to the 78th Report on Congestion of Undertrial Prisoners in Jails (1979), and again in the 277th Report (2018) on wrongful prosecution, recommending a statutory compensatory framework — has consistently identified the poor prisoner’s inability to reach appellate and remedial justice as a systemic failing demanding cure. That Arjun Jani received, in the end, only a direction for rehabilitation through the DLSA, Koraput — and not a rupee of compensation — shows how far the gap the 277th Report sought to fill still remains open.

A Blueprint: The Role Of Each Stakeholder

Drawing Jatia Hembram, Kamaljit Kaur and Arjun Jani together, a robust mechanism for jail criminal appeals should assign clear, auditable responsibilities.

District and Sessions Judges (as DLSA Chairman and on jail inspection). The District Judge does not act here in an extraneous capacity: under Section 9 of the 1987 Act he is the ex-officio Chairman of the DLSA, already charged with quarterly inspection of the Prison Legal Aid Clinic and, after Sukanya Shantha, with heading the district Board of Visitors. That mandate must be substantive, not ceremonial. At every inspection he should verify, against the register, that every convict has either filed an appeal or recorded a written refusal; confirm that free certified copies of judgments have been furnished, as M.H. Hoskot requires; fix responsibility where an appeal is overdue; and transmit a written report to the High Court on the status of pending and un-filed appeals. Had this been done in Arjun Jani, a delay of some eight and a half years could not have accumulated undetected.

DLSA and SLSA officials. Operating SOP-2022 and the Suhas Chakma directions, they must counsel each convict on his right to appeal within a fixed period of conviction, assign panel counsel promptly, track limitation and file in time, obtain and forward written refusals where a convict declines, maintain the digitised status reports, and refrain from filing consent-less “target” appeals of the kind deprecated in Kamaljit Kaur. The measure is the quality of representation, not the quantity of filings.

Jail officials (Superintendent and officer-in-charge). As the statutory conduit under Section 383 CrPC / Section 424 BNSS, they must forward jail appeals without delay, maintain the appeals register, verify claimed private appeals, and flag to the DLSA and the inspecting Judge any convict without either an appeal or a recorded refusal.

Police and the investigating agency. Arjun Jani is a reminder that the mechanism must be preventive as well as curative: the coerced confession, the planted recovery and the shoddy investigation are the very source of the wrongful conviction that must then be undone on appeal years too late. Adherence to the D.K. Basu safeguards and honest investigation are the first line of defence against a manufactured conviction ever being recorded.

Justice At The Doorstep That Never Arrived

The Supreme Court’s aspiration of “justice at the doorstep” is among the finest ambitions of our constitutional order. But justice delivery to all can mean nothing less than access to justice for all — and access is measured not by what the statute promises on paper, but by what the prisoner in the barrack actually receives. Justice, to be real, must be felt as lived experience. Arjun Jani is the measure of how far that doorstep still stands from the cell of the man who most needs it: a person too poor to engage counsel, too powerless to compel the jail machinery, and too voiceless to be noticed for twenty-two years. The statutory right of appeal existed; the fundamental right of access to justice existed; the legal-aid architecture existed. Each was defeated not by a reasoned adverse order but by delay, indifference and the absence of accountable procedure. Liberty, for him, was no abstract idea debated in a law journal; it was the difference between the world and a prison wall.

The answer is the mechanism that Jatia Hembram has begun to build and that every High Court and every District Judiciary should now institutionalise: a register that leaves no convict unaccounted for; a written record for every appeal filed and every appeal declined; a jail inspection that reports on the status of appeals; and a legal-aid apparatus that acts in time and upon genuine consent. Justice in custody is a collective duty — it is not the burden of the appellate court alone, but of the investigating officer, the jailer, the legal-services official and the inspecting judge together — and a strong institution is built only upon that shared responsibility. For the conscience of the republic is not measured by the justice it renders to those who can command it, but by the justice it carries to those who cannot afford to ask. Until that machinery is real on the ground rather than resplendent only in judgments, cases like Arjun Jani will recur — and the Constitution’s promise that no one shall lose his liberty save by fair procedure will remain, for the poorest, a promise honoured twenty-two years too late.

Author is a Senior Advocate practising in the High Court of Orissa at Cuttack.