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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Feb 20, 2014 12:47:56 GMT 5.5
[This is from my book Groundless: a few stray leaves, p. 52-53)
The legal maxim "Justice delayed is justice denied" seems to have so far been understood in connection with the unfairness for the legal process to make the injured party sustain the injury with little hope for resolution. If we remember the basic reasons for institutionalizing legal process it will become clear to us again that institutionalization systematizes legal processes and deters an anarchy of every person having to fight for his/her own safety. Institutionalization involves systematically entrusting the authority of legal processes to an appropriate office (established for the purpose) run by experts appointed by the sate, and this institution takes complete care of a state's legal processes.
However, due to several reasons lots of unprocessed or under-process cases clog up the legal drainage system, causing delays of various lengths in awarding justice and punishment. Awarding (appropriate in kind and degree) punishment to the offender does justice not only to the injured party and the offender, but also to the society they are living in.
Appropriate and timely punishment rewarded pacifies the injured party, deters similar crimes in society, and is thought to reform the deranged criminal to a normal member of society. If the case is delayed, if the offender's punishment is delayed and if he/she is let off scot-free (during which they can do many other harms), the institution loses a good amount of credibility with the people, and the patience of the injured party is really thinned down, and there are cases of the offended having taken it upon themselves to do the justice by taking revenge on the offender, which is another crime that could have been prevented by a speedy trial.
Thus, delay in trial leads to a general loss of confidence in the legal system and the legal institution's ability to do justice to society, and this loss of credibility often leads to the people taking it upon themselves to bring who they think are offenders to what they think is justice resulting in unruly mobs becoming the court and every individual lawyers and judges, a situation as good as lawlessness. While crimes and controversies are always inevitable, such avoidable anarchy is the result of the legal institution's failure in its sole service for the delivery of which a power of settlement is delegated to it by its legal subjects. |
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Post by Somorjit Yengkhom on Feb 27, 2014 15:32:32 GMT 5.5
There is a saying,"So long as you are PAINFUL to the very existing system, you have a right to criticize. But, the moment criticism becomes a matter of PLEASURE to you, you has no right to criticize." Yes, "JUSTICE DELAYED IS JUSTICE DENIED". We must not, at the same time, forget that "JUSTICE HURRIED IS JUSTICE BURIED". When we are talking about speedy disposal of cases, we need to see through the whole machinery/stakeholders of justice administration system. This lethargic-snail-paced system, what people usually love to call as a matter of pleasure, consists of Bench/Judges[/b] & staff, Bar/advocates, Public Prosecutors, the Investigating agency/Police and the witnesses. These organs of legal system are so closely connected and interwoven that the failur e in one organ will make a great difference in coming to the desired results. But unfortunately, most of common men think that "Justice Delivery system means Law Court...only Law Court." So, whenever there is delay in disposal of cases, the Court gets the slap. Behold friends!! Most of the cases in India hardly reach stage of conviction or acquittal as the Police, at times, fail to submit/file charge sheet in time. The investigating agency were influenced by powerful politicians at many instances for not filing the Charge Sheet with the sole objective of getting a default bail order as provided under Section 167, Cr.P.C. In the same manner, even if the judge is very much ready to proceed the case, if the witness or the prosecutor fails to turn up before the Court, the case will remain pending...there is the need of collective effort from all walks of life to sensitize this issue and make an endeavor to bring about co-operation and co-ordination between these organs. So friends... lay your hands for a positive change, instead of being a spectator or critic for pleasure.... |
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Feb 27, 2014 16:00:25 GMT 5.5
Of course, the legal institution is a system, and as every system is, the legal system is composed of several organs, and its veins reach every part of the society under its jurisdiction. While most part of the drama is seen in the law courts, a lot more happens outside it, and you will often see several many people you never knew existed or thought having anything to do with a particular case standing in the dock or witness box. If a trial gets delayed, the catch must be somewhere in the pipe. It is not necessarily at X, or Y, or Z. If thousands of cases get delayed, we can safely assume that the society is not so healthy as it should be. We may know it or not know it, but several people at several points in the network must be responsible for that, including many in the civil space. I think such a state of legal confusion is what Manipur is in now.
In fact the legal mechanism functions properly when its subjects are good. However, whatever reason it may be, wherever the catch may be and whoever may be responsible, delayed justice ("delay" is not synonymous with "slow" or "taking long") causes other crimes. This does not mean that trials should be hurried. Even trials that progress at a "right" speed but takes a very long time for the justice to be done can end when an innocent accused's life has already been destroyed. This is not the law's fault, not the legal mechanism's, but a human condition caused by the reality of evil people. I know the difficulties against which the wheel of the law rolls. Ideally all people, all officials should act responsibly (in which case, some may say, there will be no need of the courts). However, not all people do so, and thus delay (among unwanted but not unusual/unexpected others) arise. I think "deliberate" delay is legally culpable, but I'm not sure.( |
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Post by Somorjit Yengkhom on Mar 3, 2014 12:56:12 GMT 5.5
Yes, delay is very much there..our judicial officers all over the country are over-working from morning to late evening to shed off this image of LETHARGIC LEGAL SYSTEM...mine, as having very few cases, is an exception...the central and fundamental issue of all training programs, conferences, including the one i visited last time is SPEEDY DISPOSAL OF CASES ONLY...I do hope that we will be in a position to come up to the expectation of all within a short span of time...the most difficult part is to check DELIBERATE DELAYING TACTICS often used by shrewd lawyers, PPs and investigating agencies by giving legally acceptable reasons...WHAT i MEAN TO SAY IS THAT ULTIMATELY HUMAN ELEMENT which embraces all senses of responsibility,dedication, etc,, is that matters...e,g, The Presidential form of Government, while working excellently in USA, fails miserably in African n Latin American countries because people, the social capital, the sense of well being of all, etc. of these countries are of inferior quality compared to the people of USA... I wish that all those slumbering souls are awaken...
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Mar 12, 2014 23:21:32 GMT 5.5
Though the kind of theory of justice I believe in is focused neither solely on the idea of “just institutions” (as most theories of justice are) nor solely on the behavior of humans, my opener of this thread addresses cases filed and thus are in the pipe, and those already in the courts, delayed inordinately due to whatever cause. As a poet who is aware of what it’s like to hear/see the whole world snubbing poetry is dead, I know what it must be to a person in the institution of the law to hear somebody seriously saying what nearly everybody (probably they are ignorant about the law like me) says, “Manipur is lawless!” In fact, while it is not the fault of one particular department or section, most of Manipur’s population have very little confidence in the institution of the law, if they have not lost confidence in it completely. It’s not to say that Manipur is actually lawless, and our law courts (big or small) are not performing their duty, or they are flawed, warped, and justice is never the authorities’ concern. I don’t like shumang leela and shumang leela influenced art forms for their typical charlatanism, hyperbole and outright generalization, encouraging people to have poor opinion of our institutions with their unwarranted accusations and criticism.
The most cases of delay we know are inordinate—that’s not unavoidable. Every organ involved in the legal process needs self-examination or monitoring. It’s more a matter of ethics than the law. An expert of a country’s law who is fully aware of the loopholes in the country’s law may know or imagine a lot of theoretical scenarios in which many things we think wrong may be done, ducking prosecution, because he knows what impeccably legal reasons he can give in his defense; however, he may not do such things for ethical reasons, though he can do them safely. Ethics has its place in every human space, be it loan markets, police departments, prison management, politics, and what not. Where there is no monitor or supervisor, it’s your sense of morality/ethics/justice that regulates you, on your own. Without this inner rudder, no human system, with however tight regulations, can function properly.
This area of justice, this sense of justice in human individual and social behavior, though it interests me more, is not the topic of my thread opener; however, its off-the-frame status does not keep me from being informed by it. My concern in the post was about how inordinate delay often touches off other series of unwanted events, which the law regards as crimes, which could not have been the case if the cases were processed at a reasonable speed (despite the several determinants of judicial speed which span across several disparate institutions, organs, departments or even individuals and groups). |
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Mar 13, 2014 0:24:34 GMT 5.5
The above having been said, I should repeat here that without governable public there can be no good government. Pakistan was pointed to as the best example a couple of years ago. In the same way, the wheel of the law cannot roll without let or hindrance if a significant portion of its subject is dangerously ignorant about their laws, or morally very compromising, or don’t perform their duties, or don’t cooperate with the state. To speak in a literary way, I honor a villain who lives by his own principle/conviction if he is ready to engage in a dialogue about the ir/reasonableness of the practices of his and of his opponents, and is ready to honor the outcome of the rational debate. (Court room arguments and counter arguments are a form of debates.) Many people remain doing what they do, being what they are even if others insist they are villainous in that, just because their logic/reasoning forming their strong conviction is flawed or weak but no argument/reasoning/logic capable/strong enough to disprove their false conviction/logic/argument/reasoning comes in their way. In the absence of better arguments disproving false/wrong convictions many people remain clinging to their own convictions, though false, as their only religion of life, and in their practice of these convictions they become "villains", though they are not inherently bad. Many people with false reasons/beliefs will change how they live if the good reasons/beliefs they encounter were strong enough to disprove them. So, many villains deserve at least some honor. This reminds me of what Amartya Sen writes in the preface of his The Idea of Justice (2009, 2010), which is worth being quoted at some length: In the little world in which children have their existence’, says Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, ‘there is nothing so finely perceived and finely, as injustice.’ I expect Pip is right: he vividly recollects after his humiliating encounter with Estella and the ‘capricious and violent coercion’ he suffered as a child at the hands of his own sister. But the strong perception of manifest injustice applies to adult human beings as well. What moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just—which few of us expect—but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate.
This is evident enough in our day-to-day life, with inequities or subjugations from which we may suffer and which we have good reason to resent, but it also applies to more widespread diagnoses of injustice in the wider world in which we live. It is fair to assume that Parisians would not have stormed the Bastille, Gandhi would not have challenged the empire on which the sun used not to set, martin Luther King would not have fought white supremacy in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’, without their sense of manifest injustices that could be overcome. They were not trying to achieve a perfectly just world (even if there were any agreement on what that would be like), but they did want to remove clear injustices to the extent they could.
The identification of redressable injustice is not only what animates us to think about justice and injustice, it is also central…to the theory of justice (p. vii). Amartya Sen’s aim in this book is: to clarify how we can proceed to address questions of enhancing justice and removing injustice, rather than to offer resolutions of questions about the nature of perfect justice (p. ix). which is clearly different from the pre-eminent theories of justice in the contemporary moral and political philosophy. I’ve written what’s above in this post to prepare the ground for what comes below. Mr Sen writes: …the presence of remediable injustice may well be connected with behavioral transgression rather than with institutional shortcomings…Justice is ultimately connected with the way people’s lives go, and not merely with the nature of the institutions surrounding them. In contrast, many of the principal theories of justice concentrate overwhelmingly on how to establish “just institutions”, and give some derivative and subsidiary role to behavioral features (pp. x-xi). While this is the case, my concern in the opener of this thread is, as I noted above, about cases pending in the court (due to whatever reason it may be), and the negative impacts of judicial delay (whatever may cause it in whatever case), though I did not deal with how we can improve on it (not that I can do that). We have reason to address this delay. Reference:Sen, A. (2010). The Idea of Justice. London: Penguin. |
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