Art by Arundhati Prasad Despite existing legal frameworks that guarantee and protect the rights of prisoners, in India custodial deaths and torture often go unpunished. Police brutality and torture are ubiquitous, along with abuse of authority and discrimination against caste and religious minorities. In this analysis of judicial and administrative accountability in cases of custodial deaths in India, we focus on cases from 2015 and 2016. We selected this time period because enough time has passed to analyze whether any measures of accountability have been taken while being aware of the pace of the Indian criminal justice system. In the first essay we present the relationship between torture and liberal democracies, official data on custodial deaths in India, legislation at the national and international level on torture by public servants and the rights of prisoners including guidelines for arrest as well as the 15 cases we focus on. We find…

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