Crime and Wrongful Punishment

Given how cases like these go, it is quite possible that the acquittal of the 12 accused in the 2006 Mum­bai train bomb blasts by the Bombay High Court might still have a sequel at the Supreme Court which has paused the acquittal but allowed the men to remain free. For the moment, their guilt is in doubt, and the two-judge bench of High Court gave exhaustive reasons why it thought so—use of torture to elicit confessions, unreliable witness statements and evidence collection. The question of the absence of police accountability that comes to the fore when something like this happens is tied to what the public felt at the moment when the arrests happened. It is a fair guess to take that almost no one would have had any doubt that those arrested were terrorists. Just as everyone would have assumed that the Nithari case accused Surendra Koli was a serial killer of children until another court, 16 years af­ter his arrest, said the CBI had picked whoever they found most convenient.

In such high-profile cases, the police are under extraordinary pressure to come up with answers and find those responsi­ble. Their primary instinct is to close the case as soon as possible to slake the public’s thirst for retribution. They rely on that emotion to hide investigative shortcomings. Typically, in such cases, you see the lower courts also give a conviction because it would take a brave magistrate to say that someone is not a terrorist who bombed innocents to smithereens. It is only when it moves to the higher judiciary which has more competent judges and who can also make a fairer assessment because by now public sentiment has long dissipated for it to be a factor. Ergo, even in cases where there are convictions, you would typically find a few of the co-accused being held non-guilty.

This happens too often for it to pass off as reasonable errors in any system. Even in regular cases, the eventual conviction rates for crimes in India are very low, by some estimates, less than 50 per cent, because there are no conse­quences for deliberate wrongful arrests.

2006 Mumbai train bomb blastsaccusedacquittalBombay High CourtSupreme Court