In a bid to ensure speedy justice and tackle pendency of cases, states are coming up with quack remedies.
A trial court in Madhya Pradesh awarded death sentence Tuesday to two men for raping a minor girl less than two months ago in Mandsaur.
The investigation, arrests, trial and verdict took just two months.
Let that sink in.
However, this is not the first case where the entire system seems to have been rushed to urgently hand out a death sentence to the rape accused.
After the Madhya Pradesh assembly in December unanimously passed a bill to grant death penalty to those found guilty of raping girls aged 12 and below, at least a dozen death sentences have been awarded in a similar fashion.
The ‘instant justice’ trend in the state is hugely alarming, to say the least.
Pressure on the justice system
Experiments to reduce pendency are as old as the problem of pendency itself. India’s criminal justice system surely needs to be more efficient. Investigators must not leave obvious gaps in the enquiry of the crime. Courts must not allow prosecutors or defence lawyers to delay the trial. Judges must show sensitivity and write good judgments, evaluating the evidence correctly to ensure higher courts do not overturn the verdict on technicalities.
The Supreme Court has said that expectation of expeditious justice is a fundamental right under the Constitution. But so are a fair trial and a just opportunity to the accused.
In Jharkhand, verdicts in two cases of mob lynching were pronounced within a year, awarding life sentences to over a dozen in both cases.
Surely, investigating cases of lynching, recording statements of hundreds of witnesses and finishing the trial in a few months is an aberration, and the fact that the trials in both cases were completed within a year is no coincidence. They are part of a pilot project by the judiciary and the police in Jharkhand to tackle the backlog of cases that have affected law and order in the state.
But by pressurising the prosecutors and courts to show results, governments are only ensuring that the chances of innocent men being convicted are higher than ever.
The MP government, for instance, has devised a “reward system” to motivate its prosecutors. It awards 1000 points for a death sentence and gives them labels such as the “best prosecutor of the month” and “pride of prosecution”.
What’s worse is that chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has even felicitated prosecutors who ensured death sentences.
Death sentence as panacea
In a bid to ensure speedy justice and tackle pendency of cases, states in the country are coming up with quack remedies that are hugely problematic.
Despite studies showing that death penalty does not help mitigate crime, states have rushed to bring in the panacea law – death sentence for a crime it has failed to tackle. Most death row prisoners are overwhelmingly from scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, or other backward classes, or religious minorities.
Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan have all amended the Indian Penal Code to award mandatory death sentence to rapists of minors.
While the Centre is also mulling a similar law, even high courts have begun recommending state governments to consider bringing such laws.
Never mind that the Law Commission of India recommended the abolition of death penalty for all crimes except terrorism-related offences and “waging war” against India.
In Rajasthan, it took just 73 days for a court to award death penalty to the rapist of a minor under the amended state law.
In Haryana, it took less than two months to find a man guilty of rape and award him the death penalty.
What is most troubling is that Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomes this trend. He mentioned a case where a man was awarded death sentence within five days of trial in Madhya Pradesh in his Independence Day Speech last week.
“More such news gets published, the more such people with demonic mentality will get scared. We have to publicise such news. People should know that rapists are being sent to the gallows,” he said.
Clearly, retribution and inducing fear psychosis in the minds of citizens is how the law will operate in India now.