Accountability for State Violence: The Potential and Limitations of Studying Accountability for Deaths in Police Custody
To track both incidents of custodial death and subsequent proceedings through the data available in the NHRC portal and give an overview of the legal processes that follow a custodial death.
Process
In 2022, the team began to track deaths in police custody, initially compiling a database of media reports of such deaths from 2019 till 2022. However, this process yielded limited results due to several issues with the reporting on such cases.
In light of this experience, the team then undertook a preliminary analysis of complaints on the NHRC portal relating to police custody deaths from 2020. This analysis made clear that the NHRC represents the best resource to document accountability for deaths in custody across the country.
This report begins with an overview of legal processes that follow a custodial death (Section-II) as well as the team's various attempts to track both incidents of custodial death and subsequent proceedings (Section-III). Following this, the report details the layout of the NHRC portal and the nature of information available (Section-IV) along with the findings of team’s analysis of accountability proceedings for 2020 custodial deaths (Section-V). Finally, the report outlines the future directions of this work (Section-VI), highlighting the potential and limitations of a long-term tracker of accountability proceedings for custodial deaths.
