Criminal Justice Administration Needs Accountability
By Mahi Pal Singh
In a significant judgement on 7 January 2014, which did not get much publicity in the media, a division bench of the Supreme Court consisting of Justices C.K. Prasad and J.S. Khehar directed the home department of every state government to formulate a procedure for taking action against all erring investigating or prosecuting officials who are found responsible for failure of a prosecution case on account of sheer negligence or because of culpable lapses. It is for the first time that the Supreme Court has ordered fastening of accountability on investigating officers and public prosecutors saying that they must face punishment if it was found that their deliberate lapses resulted in the acquittal of the accused in cases involving serious offences. The Apex Court gave this ruling in a case in which shoddy investigation and lack of evidence led to the acquittal of a man accused of luring a six-year-old girl to a field, and raping and killing her, also severing her feet to steal her anklets though the trial court at Ahmedabad had found the accused guilty and considering the case ‘rarest of rare’ awarded death sentence to the accused.
If this direction of the court is implemented within the given time limit of six months sincerely, it will be a first major reform in our criminal justice administration system because for the first time it will introduce the concept of accountability for the investigators in police and also for the prosecutors. So far, there has not been any accountability for the investigators for whatever they do: frame shoddy cases against politicians and mafia on the one hand because of the police-politician-mafia nexus and deep-rooted corruption in our police and prosecution machinery, because of which Ministers and legislators remain steadfastly in their seats after acquittal in even the serious-most crimes like rape, murder, dacoity, fanning communal hatred resulting in communal riots and mass killings etc., and on the other innocent people falsely implicated in various cases spend long periods of their life in jails merely because the prosecutors and the investigators do not present their cases and non-existent evidence before the court for long periods. The result is that innocent people who cannot afford to engage able lawyers perish in jails and even those who succeed in getting bail after several years and are ultimately acquitted of the unfounded charges, lose precious years of their life at the altar of our faulty and insensitive criminal justice administration system. The accused in the first case not only enjoy freedom but also continue to rule or dominate the society with their money and muscle power and also continue to enjoy respectability in society whereas in the latter case, even though acquitted at the end of the case, loose their respect in society, their much needed jobs, whatever money or property they and their families possessed earlier and of course their freedom and liberty for long periods. The greatest loss for the society at large is that not only the victims, but also their families and relations, and sometimes their whole communities lose their faith in the justice administration system. No amount of compensation can undo or compensate them for their loss, though even that is not given to them. It goes without saying that the investigators who framed them in false cases are not held responsible for all the mess in the lives of the victims and never punished for their wanton and arbitrary acts leading to the sheer injustice meted out to the victims.
Some examples will bring out the horrendous truth of our failed justice administration system and the miseries suffered by the victims because of the unaccountability of our police force and the prosecutors.
Mohd. Amir Khan of Delhi, who was arrested at the age of 18 and implicated in 19 cases of terrorism like bomb blasts in Delhi and Ghaziabad, remained in jail for 14 years and in 2012 he was acquitted in 17 cases and released from jail. Reporting the case after his release, The Times of India dated 3 March 2012 wrote: “Of the 19 cases accusing him of masterminding the 1996-97 serial blasts, the most difficult to cope with related to the blasts in Frontier Mail in Ghaziabad killing two persons. It took nine years for the Ghaziabad court to initiate the trial against Mohammad Amir Khan. By the time the trial started in April 2007, his father, the sole breadwinner in the family, had passed away and his mother suffered a brain hemorrhage that left her paralyzed and speech impaired. The lawyer, who had been engaged by his debt-ridden mother Maimuni Bi to appear in Ghaziabad, abandoned him after a newspaper report branded Amir a Pakistani national. In fact, the press report created such prejudice against Amir that nobody from the Ghaziabad bar was willing to represent him. It was in such adverse circumstances that veteran human rights advocate N D Pancholi (a founder member of the PUCL and now President, PUCL-Delhi) came to his rescue in December 2007,” and further, “Amir was incarcerated for 14 years in the prime of his youth, not just because of the charges trumped up by the police but because the safeguards built into the criminal justice did not work. It was an institutional failure across the board: the prosecution branch and the courts are to blame as much as the police for the tragic fate of Amir….The irony is that this very claim of the police – recovery of explosive material at Amir’s instance – was rejected by the courts, including Delhi high court, in 17 of the 19 serial blast cases and, in fact, formed a major basis for his acquittal in all those cases.”
If he were guilty of serious crimes like bomb blasts in which many people must have died, he should have been behind the bars as a matter of justice to those who were killed in those bomb blasts. But an innocent youngster, he spent 14 years in jail, without being proved guilty even in a single case, instead of going to school and college and thinking of a career in life, the period any one convicted of a serious crime like murder would have spent in jail. During this period his family lost all their money and property in fighting the cases slapped against him. They also lost all the respect the family could afford to earn in spite of their poverty and simple life in their earlier life, because the tag of ‘terrorist’ was affixed to the boy in the family. No one was held accountable for the destruction of the life of the young boy and the family.
No one was, again, held accountable in the Malegaon and Ajmer Dargah blasts and the Mecca Masjid terror attack cases in which several Muslim youths were arrested, on the basis of strong evidence as claimed by the police, kept in jail for nine long years and acquitted later only when the same police found that Pragya Singh Thakur, Lt. Colonel Srikant Purohit, Ram Narain Singh, Dayanand Pandey, Devendra Gupta and Chandrashekhar, belonging to the Hindutva outfits like the Hindu Jagaran Manch and Abhinav Bharat, were involved in the cases and not the Muslim youths who had been accused earlier. Nobody knows where all the evidence, on which basis the latter were arrested, evaporated.
In 2010 Om Prakash was released on the intervention of the court from Mainpuri jail in UP after 37 years of imprisonment without trial. He was arrested on the charge of murder. Om Prakash was less than 20 at the time of his arrest. His father owned the crime to save his son. Both were arrested and the father died in jail a few years later. Had the trial taken place and Om Prakash was convicted and awarded life imprisonment, he would have come out of jail a quarter of a century ago.
In the last 37 years the trial could not even begin because the police failed to trace the papers of the case. And for this serious lapse on the part of the police, no action was taken against any police officer.
Because of his long confinement Om Prakash became insane. When he did finally come out of jail, he did not know who he was. He could not recognise his 80 years old mother, who was still happy to receive back her son in whatever condition he was at the time — a victim of gross state negligence.
Raja Ram, aged 70, spent 35 years in Faizabad jail and Varanasi mental hospital without being proved guilty. In yet another case 70-year-old Jagjivan Ram languished in prison for 36 years because his records were missing.
These few instances indicate that if there were a thorough investigation across the country in different jails, there would be many more under-trial prisoners languishing in jails without being convicted. No one has been held accountable in all the above-mentioned cases, much less punished.
It is nobody’s case that the police should abdicate its duty to catch and prosecute law-breakers and criminals. It has, however, been seen that even in cases of abduction and extra-judicial killings the guilty police officers go scot-free while even the most innocent victims suffer for their (the policemen’s) acts of omission and commission.
The detainees who prove to be innocent and are acquitted by the courts should be quite adequately compensated for the physical, emotional and social loss caused to them and their families, including the cost of litigation, which is exorbitant. Mere cosmetic police and judicial reforms cannot cure our decayed justice administration system.
There should be a proper, accurate and scientific investigation and gathering of real evidence, not concocted one, to sustain a case before the trial court. However, what is essential to make the justice administration system transparent and corruption-free is to devise a system of accountability wherein the prosecuting officers are held responsible for causing unnecessary and illegal detention of the accused. We hope that the latest judgement of the Supreme Court will make a beginning in this direction.