legalQs- ASK ANY LEGAL QUESTION

We often come across cases especially in big busy towns and cities of X pulling Y in to the court just because X is angry, and anybody can file a case against any other person if they think they have been wronged. Let’s imagine a scenario: X and Y have a heated argument about something that leads to a quarrel without any physical struggle between the two. X accuses (just because he is angry, and is not much aware of the law) Y of misbehavior in/to a legally culpable way and degree, when Y is innocent, wrong neither ethically nor legally. However, X proceeds to file an appropriate (say an assault case) against Y, and Y has to go to court, and go through the tiring grinding of the legal mill, because the law has to process the case in its usual formal course. Finally, Y is proved innocent, and he is acquitted.

However, in such legal cases (depending on the severity of the crime a defendant is accused of) the grinding of the legal mill can destroy many innocent lives, even those who could have been great minds. As such is the possibility, if a rich and powerful person P wants to destroy a weaker or a less powerful person Q by accusing him of a crime he did not commit. In this, P’s power can keep him unaffected adversely by the long, tiring and expensive grinding of the legal mill, while Q’s life, despite his ultimate victory, has already been damaged during the process, quite like Ray Gibson (Eddie Murphy) and Claude Banks (Martin Lawrence) ending almost all their life in prison in the Ted Demme film Life (1999). Currently in India after the toughening of the law against sexual offences after the 16 December 2012 Delhi gang rape case, false rape cases has increased. The Times of India reported on Saturday, 22 February 2014:


You may also be interested in some of the false case related comments on a story here.

Acquittals are not to be seen as a matter of relief. Many innocent people were thrown into trouble by many just because they were angry or just because they hated the accused. In fact, in India’s social conditions in which women (despite the country’s romantic mother and mother goddess figure of women) are treated quite pathetically, protected by the law, women can do a lot—even false complaints are entertained by the police, and as cases are filed, they (whether false or true) have to be processed in the court.

In such a situation, the life wasted during the legal processes is lost forever; however, are there some legal cares provided to the acquitted, be it compensations? In such cases, are the plaintiffs of the false cases legally culpable for their false complaints, or do they go scot-free? How are such things taken care in the Indian law? What are the rights of the acquitted in such cases?