PRAVEEN SWAMI: A state of criminal injustice

By Dilip -

The conviction rate for every kind of crime is in free fall, engendering a breakdown of law that no republic can survive 
Even criminals, back in 1953, seemed to be soaking in the warm, hope-filled glow that suffused the newly free India. From a peak of 654,019 in 1949, the number of crimes had declined year-on-year to 601,964. Murderers and dacoits; house-breakers and robbers — all were showing declining enthusiasm for crime. Large-scale communal violence, which had torn apart the nation at the moment of its birth, appeared to be a fading memory. Bar a Calcutta tram workers’ strike, which had paralysed the city for three weeks, there was no large-scale violence at all.

The sun wasn’t shining in the stone-clad corridors of New Delhi’s North Block, though, where police officials had just completed the country’s first national crime survey — the National Crime Records Bureau’s now-annual Crime in India. India, they concluded, faced a crisis of criminal justice. For one, India faced a crippling shortage of police officers. Then, poor training standards meant “there had been no improvement in the methods of investigation”. “No facilities exist in any of the rural police stations and even in most of the urban police stations for scientific investigation,” the report went on, “there had been a fall in the standard of work”. The result, Crime in India, 1953 recorded, was plain: intelligence capacities had diminished; cases were failing; criminals walking free.

 STINGING INDICTMENT: Last month, the Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association, a New Delhi-based human rights advocacy group, brought out a stinging indictment of policing in independent India. In studies of 16 cases involving the Delhi Police’s élite counter-terrorism unit, the Special Cell, the report found evidence of illegal detention, fabricated evidence and torture. Each case, the report states, ended in acquittal — but not before protracted trials destroyed the lives of suspects. Delhi Police officials have responded by arguing that the report cherry-picks cases where the prosecution collapsed. Sixty eight per cent of the 182 individuals tried for terrorism-related crimes from 1992 have been convicted. In addition, they claimed to have secured convictions in six of the 16 cases of illegal possession of arms and explosives.

 This line of defence is profoundly wrong-headed. Even if there was evidence that even one of the 16 suspects was framed or wrongfully prosecuted, that in itself would constitute a scandal. The Delhi Police’s failure to initiate an independent review of the cases does the force no credit. In using the cases to argue that terrorism related prosecutions are driven by communal malice, though, the JTSA study falls into serious errors of its own. The stark truth is that convictions for every kind of crime are in free fall, engendering a state of criminal injustice no republic can tolerate and hope to survive.

 Figures on rape prosecutions graphically demonstrate the need for caution before making the deductive leap that the police are simply framing innocents to serve communal biases, or hide their incompetence. In 2003, less than a quarter of alleged rapists were eventually convicted. In most Indian rape prosecutions, the testimony of victims is key. To suggest that the high levels of acquittals are evidence of the framing of suspects by the police would be to suggest that a large percentage of women who file rape complaints are lying — a self-evidently ridiculous proposition in our social context.

 It is entirely possible that another kind of police bias — against women — might account for this high level of acquittals; male-chauvinist police officers would, after all, conduct poor investigations. It isn’t only alleged rapists, though, who are being acquitted in record numbers. Kidnapping convictions have fallen from 48 per cent in 1953 to 27 per cent in 2011; successful robbery prosecutions from 47 per cent to 29. In 2003, less than a third of completed murder trials ended in a conviction; in 2011, the last year for which data has been published, the figure remained under 40 per cent (see table)... Read more:
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/a-state-of-criminal-injustice/article4019671.ece?homepage=true

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