PR Today: The Mystery of the Body in the Boot - Page 4

Dear Vilasini,

Wrt 1) they would do that in either case, and next they would check the pulse. It was not shown what came of that next step, so it could be either a corpse or not, and as of now, we simply do not know.

2) I understand that it would be difficult to get fingerprints off a body and impossible off the clothing. I had pointed out that Arjun's fingerprints being all over the car could be explained away as he had been working on it at the garage.

3) @ red.I am afraid your comments of the Indian legal system are wildly exaggerated. As for saying that "people make deal with legal authorities to give verdict in favor of the highest bidder", that is an even wilder statement. The Indian judicial system is highly regarded, especially at the apex level, and while miscarriages of justice of course occur at the lower levels, especially on the side of the prosecution, they are hardly the norm, as you seem to make out.

This kind of sweeping allegation, as though this was some peculiarly Indian disease (to which other countries, subtext: the US, are immune) is simply not on. Miscarriages of justice,even gross ones, are not the preserve of India, you know! You would only have check the current US press for that (just as you only have to read the Indian press to hear about all such botched and ruined cases in India) even if you did not go as far back as the Jim Crow trials and the lynch mobs against black Americans in the southern states, who all got off scot free, and this till the 1930s/1940s (they used to go in their Sunday best, with their kids on therir shoulders, to watch blacks being strung up in a public place and tortured to death, not just shot or stabbed. Then they used to mail out postcards with photos of the scene, circling themselves in it, to family and friends. There was a whole exhibition of these postcards in a NY museum in the 1990s.).The lynch mobs, and individual murderers in race killings, were either never prosecuted, or if they were, the courts acquitted them pronto.

In fact, given the current unduly high percentage of black Americans on death rows across the US, as also in the US prison population (According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, non-Hispanic blacks were 13.6% of the population, but accounted for 39.4% of the total prison and jail population in 2009), their views on the subject of the US police, prosecution and justice sysem would be most revealing.

These unduly high percentages can hardly be an accident; this was taken by US academics themselves as proof that the system was biased against blacks. I was posted in Washington DC for 7 years in all, 4 as a junor officer in the 1980s and 3 as the Deputy Chief of Mission in the mid-1990s, and I have studied this in some detail. If I was a poor black American accused of some serious offence, and if another accused was a WASP Boston Brahmin, all other things being equal, I would not rate my chances of being acquitted on par with his. Both because I would believe, rightly or wrongly in that particular case, that the system –police and judiciary - would be biased against me because of my colour, but also because I would not have access to a high-powered lawyer who would know all the ropes and all the loopholes in the law.

Now, one cannot take the above to mean that the whole US judicial system is rotten and venal. Nor am I being defensive about India: I am perfectly prepared to concede the corruption in the Indian police, the slackeness and biases of the prosecution (who, everywhere in the world, is always against the accused), and possibly corruption in the lower judiciary. Judges have been impeached in India, right up to even the Supreme Court, though the apex court still has a very high reputation. What I object to is the way in which you are taking one example and using it to tarnish the whole system, in such a throwaway manner, and that too as if such wrongdoing was exclusively an Indian phenomenon.

In fact, because of the pathbreaking and very effective PIL (public interest litigation) system introduced by the Supreme Court, miscarriages of justice can be brought to the notice of the apex court straightaway – without having to negotiate the maze of the lower courts - and corrected, and this happens often. The Jessica Lall case is one of the latest examples of this, but there have been many other cases, especially of rapes and other offences against women, mostly from the poorer classes, by powerful men,who were later brought to book by the law thru PILs to the SC.

Originally posted by: sashashyam

Dear Vilasini,...

From the SBS segment, apparently Soham entry is soon. He is probably the lawyer who will defend Arjun or even the investigating cop..let us see.

Originally posted by: vgiri

Shyamala..dont know why I removed the disclaimer I wrote before posting my reply..

I looked at things that can go against Arjun at the surface level. I respect Indian Judicial system a lot but I have personally witnessed quite a few of these malpractices/corruptions in India. I cannot compare our system with US judicial system as media is my only source in US.

Rescuing Arjun is our priority.. so Let me stick to PAP discussion and not get distracted.

The level of information/statistics you post..You are just amazing Shyamala. I really enjoy reading your posts. btw YOU ARE A ROCKSTAR!!!! age doesnt matter...

Originally posted by: sashashyam

My dear Archana,

So you are back from the sunny Caribbean climes and into the old rut, alas!

Coming to your question, the Indian judicial system, like the US one, is based on the British legal system and the Indian Penal Code was basically drawn up in British times.The rule of proof beyond all reasonable doubt applies here as well (which is why so many perfectly guilty folk get away!). Here the system is further skewed against the police, as, unlike the case in the UK and the US, a confession by the accused to a police officer is not admissible in evidence; it has to be before a magistrate.

There are other differences. The NYPD can get away with riddling an innocent foreigner with dozens of bullets when he did not understand their Freeze! order and made what they perceived as a threatening move. In India, the policemen concerned would be immediately suspended and chargesheeted for undue use of force and for second degree murder; this has happened in many cases of police firing on rioting mobs, and also in counter-terrorism cases of the so-called 'encounters'.

No one in India could have shot a (Japanese) teenager who entered the lawn of his residence on Hallowe'en and killed him, as the house owner in a US town did, and then cited self-defense against 'threatening trespass'.

So there are differences in the laws to some extent, and more so in the way they are applied, but it is true that circumstantial evidence has generally to be backed up by hard evidence. However, I doubt if "the case would be thrown out unless hard evidence is produced", an not just in India. Both British and American legal annals are full of cases where convictions were secured purely on circumstantial evidence, some of them for the death sentence (and some were later proved to have been wrong). This is true of most judicial systems.

But I should add that the most unreliable, and thus the most dangerous of all evidence is identification by eye witnesses! Then there is deliberate manipulation of forensic evidence, as in the Harrison Ford movie Presumed Innocent.

Then again, convictions for capital crimes attracted the death penalty in the UK till it was abolished in 1969 for murder (and comprehensively in 1998), while the US still executes more people every year than perhaps any other country except China. That means that a false conviction that attracted the death penalty in the US would be irreparable ' any number of such cases come to light all the time, mostly due to the new DNA techniques. In India, the last hanging, for the rape and murder of a 14 year old girl by a watchman in the housing complex where she lived (he, by the way, was a Bengali Brahmin, not a dalit), was in 2004. It is used only in 'the rarest of rare cases' and in fact I think that for heinous crimes against women and children by monsters in human form, it should be used much more often.

To revert to our PR, I agree that the circumstantial evidence against Arjun could not justify a conviction for murder. But once he gets into the maze of a prosecution, if it cannot be proved that he could not have done it because of the time factor, the fact that the body was found in his car would weigh heavily against him, however unfair it might seem. Let us suppose that it was not Arjun, but the real murderer. He too could argue that the body was planted. This way, every criminal would have to be given the benefit of the doubt and would be acquitted.

In fact, Arjun is lucky that there are no purported eyewitnesses. One can have no idea what all they can imagine that they saw, with a little help from the police. Have you read the Perry Mason novels, and how the DA's office neatly organizes the identification parades AFTER having informally given the witness a good close look at the accused? No wonder then that the witness is then so categoric in identifying the accused ' often completely wrongly ' and such is their self-belief that they cannot be shaken by the toughest cross-examination. Such things, dear Archana, happen all the time even in your "good old justice system". And I am here not even talking of biases based on colour or other factors, which are everywhere, including in the police. In India too.

As for the charge, one has as yet no idea what it would be, and that would depend not only on whether the man in dead, but also on what the background to the crime is. For example, he could be accused of transporting the body to help out a gang. If he insists on remaining 'just Arjun', he will be a sitting duck for this kind of charge. The Mumbai underworld has any number of footsoldiers!

That is more than enough, I should think! Bye for now.

Shyamala