Court case(1980) 1 SCC 81

A series of articles in the Indian Express in early 1979 exposed that thousands of undertrial prisoners in Bihar jails, many of them women and children, had been in custody for years, sometimes longer than the maximum sentence the charge carried, without their trials even beginning. Advocate Kapila Hingorani filed a habeas corpus petition under Article 32 in the name of Hussainara Khatoon and other prisoners. The State's returns showed that many prisoners had no lawyer and had never been produced before a court.

In a sequence of orders Bhagwati J held that the right to a speedy trial is implicit in the guarantee of a fair procedure under Article 21 as read in Maneka Gandhi: a procedure that keeps people in jail for years without trial is neither reasonable nor just. He further held that free legal services to a poor accused are an essential ingredient of such a procedure, and that Article 39A (inserted by the 42nd Amendment, 1976) makes legal aid a constitutional directive which the State must implement. The Court ordered the release of undertrials who had been in jail longer than the maximum punishment, the release of others on personal bond, and directed the State to provide lawyers at its cost and to speed up trials.