IN THE SUPREME COURT OF INDIA
CRIMINAL APPELLATE JURISDICTION
CRIMINAL APPEAL NOS. 1271-1272 OF 2018
MUNNA PANDEY …APPELLANT VERSUS
STATE OF BIHAR …RESPONDENT
J U D G M E N T
CONCEPT OF FAIR TRAIL
- All fair trials are necessarily legally valid, but is the reverse necessarily true? What then is the genesis of the concept of a fair trial? The concept of a fair trial has a very impressive ancestry, is rooted in history, enshrined in the Constitution, sanctified by religious philosophy and juristic doctrines and embodied in the statute intended to regulate the course of a criminal trial. Its broad features and ingredients have, in course of time, been concretised into well recognised principles, even though there are grey areas, which call for further legal thought and research.
- Truth is the cherished principle and is the guiding star of the Indian criminal justice system. For justice to be done truth must prevail. Truth is the soul of justice. The sole idea of criminal justice system is to see that justice is done. Justice will be said to be done when no innocent person is punished and the guilty person is not allowed to go scot free.
- For the dispensation of criminal justice, India follows the accusatorial or adversarial system of common law. In the accusatorial or adversarial system the accused is presumed to be innocent; prosecution and defence each put their case; judge acts
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as an impartial umpire and while acting as a neutral umpire sees whether the prosecution has been able to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt or not.
- Free and fair trial is sine-qua-non of Article 21 of the Constitution of India. If the criminal trial is not free and fair, then the confidence of the public in the judicial fairness of a judge and the justice delivery system would be shaken. Denial to fair trial is as much injustice to the accused as to the victim and the society. No trial can be treated as a fair trial unless there is an impartial
judge conducting the trial, an honest, able and fair defence counsel and equally honest, able and fair public prosecutor. A fair trial necessarily includes fair and proper opportunity to the prosecutor to prove the guilt of the accused and opportunity to the accused to prove his innocence.
- The role of a judge in dispensation of justice after ascertaining the true facts no doubt is very difficult one. In the pious process of unravelling the truth so as to achieve the ultimate goal of dispensing justice between the parties the judge cannot keep himself unconcerned and oblivious to the various happenings taking place during the progress of trial of any case. No doubt he has to remain very vigilant, cautious, fair and impartial, and not to give even a slightest of impression that he
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is biased or prejudiced either due to his own personal convictions or views in favour of one or the other party. This, however, would not mean that the Judge will simply shut his own eyes and be a mute spectator, acting like a robot or a recording machine to just deliver what stands feeded by the parties.
- Malimath Committee on Judicial Reforms discussed the paramount duty of Courts to search for truth. The relevant observations of the Committee are as under:-
(a) The Indian ethos accords the highest importance to truth. The motto “Satyameva Jayate” (Truth alone succeeds) is inscribed in our National Emblem “Ashoka Sthambha”. Our epics extol the virtue of truth.
(b) For the common man truth and justice are synonymous. So when truth fails, justice fails. Those who know that the acquitted accused was in fact the offender, lose faith in the system.
(c) In practice however we find that the Judge, in his anxiety to demonstrate his neutrality opts to remain passive and truth often becomes a casualty.
(d) Truth being the cherished ideal and ethos of India, pursuit of truth should be the guiding star of the Justice System. For justice to be done truth must prevail. It is truth that must
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protect the innocent and it is truth that must be the basis to punish the guilty. Truth is the very soul of justice. Therefore, truth should become the ideal to inspire the courts to pursue.
(e) Many countries which have Inquisitorial model have inscribed in their Parliamentary Acts a duty to find the truth in the case. In Germany Section 139 of the so called ‘Majna Charta’, a breach of the Judges’ duty to actively discover truth would promulgate a procedural error which may provide grounds for an appeal.
(f) For Courts of justice there cannot be any better or higher ideal than quest for truth.