Examine how custodial torture and media trials undermine the presumption of innocence.

The presumption of innocence — guilt must be proved beyond reasonable doubt by the State — is the core of the fair trial guarantee read into Article 21. Custodial torture and media trials invert this burden: one manufactures the proof, the other manufactures the verdict, long before a court rules.

Custodial torture: coerced proof replaces investigation

• Torture extracts confessions, violating Article 20(3) (no compulsion to be a witness against oneself); confessions to police are therefore inadmissible in evidence.
• It makes the accused the source of the case against himself — the State stops gathering independent evidence once a "confession" exists.
• The Surinder Koli case illustrates this: statements later found to have been taken under torture sustained 13 death sentences between 2009 and 2022, all undone on appeal, the Allahabad High Court terming the probe "botched up" and an "easy course of implicating a poor servant".
• India still lacks a standalone anti-torture law; the Law Commission recommended one alongside implementation of the UN Convention against Torture, which remains unratified [1].

Media trials: public verdict before judicial verdict

• Prejudicial pre-trial publicity — labels like "butcher of Nithari", sensational "true crime" coverage — leaves no space for reasonable doubt and pressures witnesses and investigators. The Law Commission's report on Trial by Media (2006) proposed amending the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971 to allow postponement of prejudicial publication [2].
• Accusation gets prime time; acquittal rarely does, so social guilt survives legal innocence.

Consequence: innocence restored on paper alone

• Koli, acquitted by the Supreme Court in November 2025 after nearly 20 years, received no psychosocial care, housing, employment or compensation, and died within a year of release. The Law Commission's 2018 report on Wrongful Prosecution (Justice B.S. Chauhan) proposed district special courts using summary procedure, with both monetary relief and counselling, skilling and removal of disqualifications — still unenacted [3].

Protecting the presumption therefore needs three converging reforms: mandatory audio-video recording of interrogations and a dedicated anti-torture statute; court-supervised postponement orders with strengthened media self-regulation; and a statutory compensation-cum-rehabilitation framework on the Commission's model. Liberty under Article 21 is real only when the State bears both the burden of proof and the cost of getting it wrong.