Suggestions for expediting justice without the stigma of justice hurried is justice buried 1!

02 FEB 2015

Completing a few cases a day is infinitely superior to hearing several cases a day.

   We should remember that it is better to complete a few cases every day than to 'hear' many cases a day! Hearing many cases is an input but completing cases is the output. If we have to increase the output, which is the only way to at least arrest the cancerous increase every day of the number of pending cases, the justice administration authority should insist on the number of cases completed, not just the number of cases heard, by every judge in the lowest courts upwards to and including the Supreme Court. This should form a criterion for elevation of judges.

The root-cause for delay is the sum of waiting times and not the time required to give justice, as it is made out to be.

The root-cause of the problem for only hearing and not completing cases is not the time for processing a case – I mean the time for hearing arguments on either side and for the judge to apply his mind and deliver the judgment - but it is the sum of waiting times in the process of the justice delivery system. Unless this waiting time is reduced significantly, there is no way the time for delivering justice will come down. In this sense the process that goes on in courts is identical to the process that goes on in industry and institutions all over the world: It is the waiting time that is the key contributor to the delays and low throughput and not the process times.

Here are a few suggestions for reducing the waiting times:

Suggestion 1: When a judge in any court gives the next date for hearing, it should not be more than a week from the current date of hearing. There is no data or information on earth in today’s internet-connected world that cannot be collected and submitted to the court within one week. In case the judge decides to time the next hearing beyond a week, the judge should give a reason/justification for the extended period of time. I have often seen that the dates given at the smaller courts are at least one month later, and that too on the working day following the completion of one month from the current date and not even one working day earlier to the completion of one month!

Suggestion 2: There should be a ceiling on the number of such postponements of hearing. Today the postponements are for the flimsiest reasons one can think of or for no reason at all! If this ceiling is crossed, and / or in case one of the parties do not appear, (this happens just for getting the case postponed by one party and not for any genuine reason more often than not), it should be made clear by the justice delivering authority in this country that the court will go ahead assuming the absence is deliberate and is meant to thwart the timely delivery of justice and that it will deliver the judgment ex-parte, in the very next hearing that is just one week away, on which there can be no appeal or an appeal to be filed within not more than one week.

Suggestion 3: The judge should come to the court room after reading the relevant papers: This is quite different from today’s practice – at least in smaller courts- that the judge gets the relevant file only when he arrives in the court room. He then starts reading it from the first page and normally the file size is quite thick since the case is going on for at least two decades, and in the meantime, so many judges have changed. As the learned judge is reading the file, everyone else is waiting. If the learned judge comes prepared with the facts of the case, and asks a few vital, probing questions to the advocates on either side that can extract the distinguishing information regarding the legality of the case, justice can be delivered much more speedily. This practice of reading the file and jotting down the vital few probing questions before a judge comes to the court room makes the judges more productive in less time and thus makes them more effective. This may reduce the number of hours the judge spends in the court hall but vastly increase the number of cases not just heard but completed and closed.

Suggestion 4: In the current system, the number of cases just heard per day helps all including advocates, judges and others except the hapless citizens of this country who are the affected parties. So, the number of hearings is advantageous to all stakeholders except the hapless citizen and therefore, whereas the number of hearings keep increasing, the number of cases getting completed keeps decreasing or remain stagnant. Where is the incentive for advocates and judges to close a case? So the current reward system is in the interest of all in the justice delivery system except the hapless citizen looking for timely justice. The reward system should be changed for all involved namely advocates and judges. This country has enough cases pending for feeding the next two generations of advocates and judges at least, so the fear of reduction of income for these people is totally unfounded. Imagine the automobile industry starts doing this, we have to wait for acquiring a car, after booking one, for two generations!

Suggestion 5: More critical than the number of judgments delivered by a judge, is the quality of these judgments. This seems to be an area which no one dares to tread because the trespasser may invite the dreaded contempt of court law. As no one can pass a judgment on the quality of a judgment, the only option we have is using a higher court judgment as a test on the quality of the lower court judgment.

So we suggest as follows:

If any judgment is sustained by the next higher court to which it is appealed, the judge who has passed the judgment at the lower court should get one point on his performance. This is the reward he gets for applying his mind seriously before passing a judgment. Likewise, if a lower court's judgment is reversed by the next higher court, he should get a negative point in his performance. This will deter any judge to give judgments without considering all the points put forth by the advocates for both the parties and without fully reading the file. This will enable him to apply his mind to what the relevant law says and then give his judgment. Today there is a gaping loop hole in this aspect as there is nothing in the justice delivery system that positively prevents a judge from overlooking some key points of law, though they have been put forward by the advocates. There is nothing in the justice delivery system of today that positively prevents extraneous considerations from getting in. After all the judges are also human! As Addison's law states: "If anything can go wrong, it will."

There is another factor that facilitates giving judgments without full application of mind to all the points raised by both the advocates: The lower court judges seem to think that their judgments do not matter that much, because they can always be appealed against! The result is the system we currently have facilitates and encourages appeals, thus over-loading high courts and the Supreme Court.

The cumulative net points to-date earned by a judge as suggested above should be a key parameter in the decision to elevate a judge or not. At least this will bring in much needed accountability in the deliverance of justice. As the system stands today, the accountability of judges in such a critical system as the justice delivery system, is jeopardized.

An ineffective system assumes that people have to be accountable for the role they play, whereas an effective system has catalyst elements in it to make sure that people are indeed accountable for the role they are expected to play.

One affected indian Bakra/bakri in the service of the people of India.