Has the justice system been “Designed” through an engineering intent, process and spirit OR has it simply “fallen into place” the way it is, based on incidentally traversed “past-imperfect” historical concourse?
- Historically Justice was being delivered by Kings themselves so there was no possibility of any scrutiny of performance of deliverables, or enforcement of any “working hours” or timeliness.
- There was a forced “respect” and unconditional compliance to whatever and however they decided.
- Then came the British era … where some semblance of “collective wisdom” and “objectivity” was brought in the form of “members of jury” and a “Constitution” and documented “Penal Code”
- But then it all became too bureaucratic and procedural, with rigid norms of working and paperwork heavy … inherently lacking “responsiveness”
- Rather than becoming like a car / bike that could easily navigate through traffic / chaos and reach on time; it became like a “road roller” chugging at its pace slowly and predictably … so that it could be easily escaped.
Missing Design Intent:
What is the Design Objective? … To control crime and violations of the law
For that to happen the rate of delivering justice must be more than incident rate of crime / violations
- Do criminals have limited working hours, weekly off OR gazetted holidays? … If they do not have how can the judicial process have?
- Unlike most other processes lawyers and judiciary have no performance measures that are monitored.
- It there were performance measures what should those be? … Rate of delivering justice.
- How long does it take to commit a murder or a rape including the planning / plotting etc? … Possibly, few days, weeks or months BUT the justice process is allowed to take several years & decades to decide the case. It is a big empirical mismatch
- Consequently we are at mercy of criminals as the rate of crime / violations is restricted only by the capacity and appetite of criminals rather than through legal deterrence?
The Shortcomings
One issue is of course pertaining to capacity shortfall; but beyond that there are so many issues to be addressed:
- Is there any monitoring and questioning of time taken by the process?
- Are the lawyers / judges being penalized for delaying justice? No they are not … sometimes if fact …delaying becomes the core competence that lawyers get paid for.
- If decisions get reversed at higher court, are people associated in lower courts with contrary decision made accountable? … No they are not.
- The law is written in such a complex manner that to understand and overcome that complexity one requires legal expertise assistance… and in spite of being a voluminous text … it is still subject to lot of variability in interpretation.
- Rather than delivering justice it has become a blind quest for “seeking justice at any cost” … cost implies both time, agony and money.
- Is it serving the purpose of delivering justice OR has it become just a lasting employment providing mechanism for the “legal class”?
Until the system gets designed to do what it is supposed to do … we will keep hearing “justice delayed is justice denied” but nothing will get done to prevent and pre-empt the same.
AVINASH KHARE