The killing of two people by Chenthamara, who was waiting for trial for 5 years and on bail, in Kerala, is nothing but a grave warning of the appalling state of our criminal justice system. If this person had been tried in time, we could have avoided the death of two innocent people. The state of the Indian Judicial system is alarmingly worrying. A senior advocate of the Supreme Court of India, Dushyant Dave, recently said, “It (our Criminal Justice System) is not collapsing, but in my mind, it has collapsed”. He further states that there are “5.2 Crores of cases pending in our courts. You can never dispose of them in our lifetime or even in a hundred years.”

Look at the pathetic state of our Criminal Justice System. In Kerala alone, over 12 lakh cases are pending: 3 lakhs of pending cases less than one year old; 3 lakhs of criminal cases pending between 1-3 years old; about 2 lakhs cases between 3-5 years old and over 3 lakhs of cases between 5-10 years old, it’s rather frustrating that over 20 thousand cases, even over 10 years old, are pending! Why is our Criminal Justice System not progressing with societal changes? How can, in any society, people have to wait more than 10 years to seek justice? Our politicians are murdering our legal system by neglecting and deliberately failing required reforms.

In England and Wales, in 2023, the Magistrates Court received 1.37 million cases and disposed of 1.34 million. In the Crown Court, in the same year, 105,000 cases were received, and 99,000 were disposed of. ‘’In 2023, the Crown Court had 68,000 outstanding cases’; in Kerala alone, we have 3 lakh cases that are 0–1 year old.

‘India has the lowest per capita ratio of judges, perhaps in the world’, the 1987 Law Commission Report suggested 50 judges per million population. The per capita ratio of judges in Britain is 62; in France, 112; in Poland, 204 Judges and Magistrates per million people. Interestingly, in December 2023, the Law Minister of India said that despite the recommendation being 50 in 1987, it works out to be approximately 21 judges per million in the country. There lies the problem.

How can society progress without prosecuting and punishing offences in time? Reform in our policing is long overdue. The new enactment gives no hope at all of controlling the situation; plagiarism is only an offence at colleges and universities. If it had been applicable in the Indian parliament, they would have been expelled for almost 95% plagiarism.

The real problem lies with the policing and the investigation in India. In Britain, police do the investigation, whereby an officer does the investigation, and the accused is provided with a lawyer even before the interview/interrogation. They will be provided with enough information to assess the strength of the case. The lawyer and his client will then have a private consultation; a recorded interview will be conducted with both the lawyer and his client present. Before the interview, caution is given (the same as the Crpc 164 and the new BNSS 183). This interview is admissible in court, unlike in India, where we still keep the interview inadmissible, a system which the British Empire followed because they did not want to take into account any native police officer statement, so they excluded anything said to the police, as they did not trust the Indian police officers. Sadly, we still follow the same process, although the British saw it as archaic and/or Victorian-era policing and repealed it altogether. Nevertheless, with great pride, we Indians keep it intact.

In Britain, once the matter is at the Magistrate’s Court, the investigation has been completed, and as the interview is admissible, the client has to accept what he has said at the police interview; if there were an admission, the accused would have no other way than to plead guilty at the very first appearance because he has already admitted in a police station. Sadly, in India, whatever the accused has said at the police station interview is not admissible, upon his first appearance, more likely than not, he will plead not guilty, and the investigation restarts again in the Magistrates Courts. It must not be the role of the courts to investigate a case and administer Crpc 164 or BNSS s183, but it should be the police doing the investigation. Of course, if the accused denies the police investigation, then challenge it at the trial.

England and Wales had a ‘median wait of 129’ days between an offence being recorded and someone being charged and a ‘median wait of 32 days between a defendant being charged and the first court listing’. There was a median time of ‘182 days between the offence being reported and the case completion’ (in Kerala, Mr Chenthamara was still waiting for trial over 1800 days). In Magistrate’s Court, ‘72% of cases were completed at the first hearing’. This has been achieved simply because the police are investigating, but not the court.

The only way the Indian criminal justice system can be fixed is by an urgent reform of police doing the investigation at the investigation stage and letting the court address the case only after the completion of the investigation. Another suggestion would be appointing lay magistrates who are retired army service personnel by providing them sufficient training and keeping it as a voluntary sector by meeting their minimum expenses, along with an expert legal adviser who can advise the magistrates. An appointment of 3 or even 6 magistrates (lay bench) with an expert legal advisor who is a qualified lawyer employed by the state may resolve a severe crisis and thus put the trust and confidence back in our justice system