INDIA: A 70-year-old man who was simply forgotten and spent nearly four decades in an Indian prison without charge has finally been freed on bail by the country's supreme court.
Jagjivan Ram Yadav, who was arrested in 1968 in Faizabad in northern Uttar Pradesh state for allegedly killing his sister-in-law, never faced trial because the authorities lost his papers.
His family had long ago given him up for dead.
Thereafter he was, like thousands of others in jails across the country, forgotten in India's vast, desperately disorganised and callous justice system, where the poor and powerless are often overlooked.
"We direct that he shall be released on bail forthwith on his furnishing a personal bond," chief justice YK Sabharwal of the supreme court said in his order this week in response to a petition by local lawyers.
Mr Yadav's plight was revealed by regional newspapers last summer when prison authorities asked the court about the prisoner, who had been awaiting trial for decades.
A lawyers' group has also been fighting for his release.
Mr Yadav is expected to join his wife in his home village of Milkipur shortly.
In a similar shocking case, another 70-year-old man spent 45 years in jail awaiting trial for a crime that carries a three-year sentence if he had been convicted.
Imprisoned in Unano district jail, also in Uttar Pradesh state, in 1961, for attacking a fellow villager with a knife, Shankar Dayal will now be tried and freed over the next few weeks.
Mr Dayal's tribulations also include being confined for a decade - wrongly, it now turns out - in the local asylum, to which he was committed a few months after being arrested. He underwent untold physical deprivation and abuse there.
Indian courts are burdened with over 20 million civil and 10 million criminal cases.
Lawyers say cases drag on indefinitely, many in the civil list resolved decades after the original litigant's demise.
According to a National Crime Research Bureau study called Crime in India 2002, some 220,000 criminal cases took over three years to reach court, while another 25,600 took nearly a decade to be decided.
"A majority of Indians have lost faith in the judicial system, and are either settling out of court or hiring professional muscle men to settle civil disputes," said noted Delhi lawyer Malavika Rajkotia-Luthra.
A staggering number of prison inmates awaiting trial have already been imprisoned longer than the most rigorous sentence they could ever get.
Most of India's prisons date back to British colonial rule, with tens of thousands of prisoners interned in crumbling, overcrowded and unhygienic facilities which have remained largely unchanged since the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The only major prison reform to be implemented in the country dates back to the Indian Jails Committee of 1919-1920, nearly three decades before India won its independence from British rule.