B. L. Razdan
Immediately after being administered the oath of office recently a senior member of the higher judiciary remarked “justice hurried is justice buried”.
No sooner did I read these remarks in the next morning newspaper than the problems confronting the Indian judicial system flashed in my mind.
I wondered whether this approach is, at least to some extent, responsible for the ills of our judiciary and whether the honourable judge was unaware of another pithy and more often quoted maxim, “Justice delayed is justice denied”.
I also tried hard to recall an instance when a judicial verdict was passed hurriedly, but failed somewhat miserably. My plight was more miserable because I could not recall any judicial order, if at all passed in a hurried manner, having resulted in miscarriage of justice. On the other hand, I have been the victim of adjournments granted repeatedly in a writ petition filed by my nephew and promptly admitted by the Honourable Court because of the urgency involved, yet the decision was handed down in the next academic year – by which time my adversary had completed one year in the Government Dental College.
And what is worse is that this delay – may not be deliberate – was used as a ground for regularizing her admission granted in gross violation of the rules.
How much injustice is perpetrated in the name of granting justice by the Indian judicial system can be gauged from the spate of adjournments granted in the course of hearing, so much so that seeking adjournments has become an accepted strategy contrived to deny one’s adversary the fruits of justice in his life time and forcing him to settle the matter out of court, which itself leads to the compromise of his full rights and in effect, denial of justice.
While the conflict as to who first used the legal phrase – William Gladstone or William Penn – is yet to assume finality, it does figure in clause 40 of Magna Carta, which reads, “To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice.” The reason one goes to court is to get justice, and “Justice Delayed is Justice Denied” Thus if legal redress is available to a party that has suffered some injury, but is not forthcoming in a timely fashion, it is effectively the same as having no redress at all.
This principle, at times, forms the basis of the right to a speedy trial because it is considered unfair for the injured party to have to sustain the injury with little hope of resolution. In fact, the phrase has become a rallying cry for legal reforms by crusaders who view courts as acting rather too slowly in resolving legal issues either because the existing system is too complex, overloaded or overburdened.
I hope I have not committed any contempt of court; for I believe what Justice Felix Frankfurter of the U S Supreme Court (1939 – 1962) remarked decades back, “Judges as persons, or courts as institutions are entitled to no greater immunity from criticism than other persons or institutions, just because the holders of judicial office are identified with the interests of justice they may forget their common human frailties and fallibilities. There have sometimes been martinets upon the bench as there have also been pompous wielders of authority who have used the paraphernalia of power in support of what they called their dignity.
Therefore, Judges must be kept mindful of their limitations and of their ultimate public responsibility by a vigorous stream of criticism expressed with candor however blunt.”
As Chief Justice of the United States Warren E. Burger noted: “A sense of confidence in the courts is essential to maintain the fabric of ordered liberty for a free people and three things could destroy that confidence and do incalculable damage to society: that people come to believe that inefficiency and delay will drain even a just judgment of its value; that people who have long been exploited in the smaller transactions of daily life come to believe that courts cannot vindicate their legal rights from fraud and over-reaching; that people come to believe the law – in the larger sense – cannot fulfill its primary function to protect them and their families in their homes, at their work, and on the public streets.”
Said the U S Federal Judge Justice John F Dillon, “The most satisfactory ideal I have ever been able to form of Justice is embodied in the picture of a judge courageous enough to give the devil his due, whether he is in the right or in the wrong. Equally importantly a judge must have the courage and integrity and the constitutional philosophy of doing justice to the poor, to the lowly, forlorn, and the downtrodden.”
A precious word of advice from none other than the celebrated Greek philosopher Socrates, who said. “Four things belong to a judge; to hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly and to decide impartially.” Surprisingly, he did not remark about justice hurried or justice delayed, most probably because this problem may not have cropped up then.
And lastly, another gem addressed to the Judges by the celebrated Jurist Learned Hand, “Men do not gather figs of thistles, nor supply institutions from Judges whose outlook is limited by parish or class. They must be aware that there are before him more than verbal problems, more than final solutions cast in generalizations of universal applicability. They must be aware of the changing social tensions in every society which make it an organism; which demand new schemata of adaptation; which will disrupt it, if rigidly confined.”
It is now for their Lordships to decide.
(The author was a senior member of the Indian Revenue Service and retired as the Director General of Income Tax (Investigation), North-West Region. Views are his own.)
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