Reforming Criminal Justice System in India

REFORMING CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM OF INDIA.


Prof.Joseph K. Alexander
Chairman, IIPA Kerala Regional Branch.

Human society in its evolution instituted standards of conduct for family, school, religion, their working places and all kinds of other groupings. Survival of the group is the basic goal of all these rules and systems. Criminal law is one among them. While tort is an action against individual, criminal act is against the society. So preservation of the society is the aim of criminal law. Hence a criminal law that does not protect the vulnerable and weaker sections, which form the majority cannot be said to be just.

What I find most intriguing in the working of Indian Criminal Procedure Code System is that often the poor are the victims in criminal cases. Except for a few underworld and rich mafia who are in the dock of the CPC system, 99 % or more of the criminal cases, actions against, and jail term before and after conviction, are of the marginalized, poor, dalits, and downtrodden. Is it because the poor and hapless alone are the criminals in our society, or is it due to corruption of the police-judiciary-bureaucracy-politician nexus that can thwart any CP action against them; or is it because that others in the society are more literate and adopt sophisticated modalities that leave no trace for CP system to inculpate them in any criminal case? How can we tackle this problem?

The Amnesty international in a critique on the Malimath Committee Report point out the that its recommendations do not address the human rights of these underprivileged and vulnerable of the society. So the recommendation of this Report fails to make the criminal Justice system just.

A second problem is about the aim of CPC system. Reform of the offender and warning to the criminals is an objective of the implementation of CP system. In the notorious Aluva murder case Antony Manjooran dastardly murdered in cold-blood 6 persons of a family in a single night. The court sentenced him to death. He appealed to convert it to lifetime imprisonment. Last week the court rejected the appeal on the ground that the death sentence should remain as a warning to criminals. But the prolonged interment of pre-trial, under-trial and regular imprisoned criminals make the jails in India overcrowded and a hotbed of criminals to imbibe new crimes and new ways of doing them. The very purpose of CP system gets defeated. Instead of reforming them, our Jail System creates more criminals. Can we suggest viable and pragmatic solution?

A third issue that is seeking solution is that our CPC System tries to protect the accused. Rule of law and the rule that no person is guilty unless proved by law make the system circumlocutory and favouring the accused even at the cost of the victim. The law fails to protect the victim. This is flagrant in the rape cases where the victim is harassed in many different ways to disprove the case and to protect the accused. Any reform that does not address this can be said to be just. Can we orient our approach to Criminal Justice System of India to protect the victims also?

Another poser is the trial by media pointed out a fortnight ago by the 200th Report of the 17th Law Commission appointed by the Government of India. The press and the electronic media discuss cases under trial threadbare, and their opinions often influence the judges. The crime may get mollified and the criminal escapes while the victim of the crime is denied justice, or the crime is aggravated and an innocent man is punished while the real culprit escape. If we try to gag the media, the corrupted police, investigation and the judiciary may perpetrate injustice. Which is the benchmark between media trial and need for transparency to curb corruption.