Police must urgently curb procedural lapses: Evidence must be made trustworthy

It is in the State’s own interest that litigation should end, fast and durably when the police crosses the t’s and dots the i’s with respect to paperwork. A woman gets bail because the police, arresting her for her husband’s murder, never told her why she was being arrested. A former chief minister walks free because a charge-sheet dissolves into inference stacked on inference. A clinic in Hisar gets acquitted 19 years after a raid because the complaint against it bore one signature where the statute demanded three. Three courts, decades apart, arrive at the same finding: The police investigative process is broken.