Khudiram Bose Memorial Central Jail. Picture by Puja

Muzaffarpur, Sept. 2: Members of the Bihar State Legal Service Authority have been trying their best to educate prisoners and under trials of Khudiram Bose Memorial Central Jail in the district.

As a result, a large number of prisoners have not only become familiar with the proceedings of the law, but have also successfully pleaded their own cases in the court with the help of advocates of the district.

The Bihar State Legal Service Authority constituted a district-level panel of eight lawyers for the central jail last year.

These lawyers are engaged in making the inmates of the jail familiar with matters of the law.

Lawyers, who have joined the panel to undertake the task, are Vijay Kumar, Sangita Shahi and Sunita Kumari.

The superintendent of Khudiram Bose Memorial Central Jail, Vishwanath Prasad, told The Telegraph that the legal aid and literacy campaign among the prisoners and the undertrials in the jail has proved to be a big boon for them.

The initiative of the district-level team of lawyers at the behest of Bihar State Legal Service Authority for providing justice to all has helped many of the prisoners and undertrials of the jail.

More than 85 prisoners have been released with the help of the initiative.

Sangita Shahi, a lawyer, said the team of lawyers had tried to educate the inmates about the importance and implications of “plea bargaining”.

Sangita also said the concept of plea bargaining had been introduced in jails across the state for the first time by the Bihar State Legal Service Authority.

Under this provision, the convicts can plead guilty and regret their crime and agree to pay compensation to the victim and family members beside the legal expenses, then they would escape confinement.

Undertrials charged under the IPC sections 223, 224, 323, 379, 411, 414 and 504B come under the purview of plea bargaining.

The assistant jailor of Khudiram Bose Memorial Central Jail, Sudarshan Kumar, said lawyers frequ- ently organised legal awareness camps here that attra-cted a large number of pri soners.

This has also provided an opportunity to several outsiders who land in jail in course of their trip to the state.

Lawyers in district-level team formed at the instance of Bihar State Legal Service Authority lend them a helping hand and often succeed in bailing them out.

Moreover, a literacy campaign among the inmates of Khudiram Bose Memorial Central Jail has succeeded in making 245 of them literate.

Nine of them are likely to take the forthcoming Bihar state school examination board matriculation examination in 2011.