November 25, 2018 Sunday
Bedtime Story
The Price of Fair Trials
Fair Trials by their very definition and
execution modalities are extremely time-consuming, prohibitively expensive for
the state (and for the accused if he is a man of resources who wishes to defend
himself with the best of counsels), phenomenally boring and painstakingly
tedious for the reason of which not surprisingly they have become the scorn of
the elite class.
It is truer in overpopulated nations where
the pendency of criminal and civil cases is not only huge but keeps on growing
everyday due to incessantly increasing backlog piling up each moment.
You may ask how that is possible for most
courts do not work every day or all the time.
As Inspector Jacques Clouseau tells his
secretary Nicole Durant in the movie ‘The Pink Panther’ (2006) “Crime does not
rest Nicole” and therefore the criminal cases keep on piling up at a much
faster rate than they are dealt with.
The law enforcement agencies which are
primarily the state police is on duty 24/7 and even with their full-hearted
intent to register as minimum FIRs as possible criminal cases keep on accruing.
There is very little of the court-room
dramas often depicted in suspenseful tightly-knit thrillers by the master
writers of the genre of crime fiction that I so much adore.
Once the crime has been committed and the purported
accused arrested the process of penology that follows thereafter is very
intricate and much more so if the accused has resources to hire the best legal
minds besides influencing the law enforcing agencies in more devious ways.
The adversarial system under which most
criminal-trial courts operate are exploited to its hilt by the lawyers of the
defendant where the accused has all the rights, the freedom to remain silent
and freedom not to be questioned either by the judge or the prosecution.
The rules of admission of evidences are
very strict and the chief duty of the judges is to be an impartial person whose
role is to ensure fair play of due process so that rules of fundamental justice
are enacted out as stated in the Criminal Procedure Code of that nation.
To get a better understanding of the role
of judge there is a noteworthy example in the book ‘Practical Guide to Evidence’
written by Peter Murphy.
A frustrated judge in an English (adversarial)
court has been hearing conflicting accounts of several witnesses in a trial.
Tired of it he asks the barrister, “Am I
never to hear the truth?”
The counsel of the defense replies, “No, my
Lord, merely the evidence”.
We all have come across adversarial system
of criminal-trial through various forms of crime fictions (books and movies
generally) but is there any alternative form of approach to a criminal trial
besides the familiar one?
Yes, there is one.
It is called the inquisitorial system where
the defendant has confessed to the said crime but yet that does not imply the
trial would not take place.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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