Suggestions for expediting justice without the stigma of justice hurried is justice buried 3!

18 MAR 2015

   Suggetion 8:

Pareto’s law is applicable to number of cases pending in courts too. Shortly put, this means that there will be several cases that may not need long times for hearing and giving justice and only a few cases needing longer time for disposal. In other words, some 5% of the pending cases only may need long time to close, another 15% may need medium time spans to close and 80% of cases may need very short times to dispose off. This is an inviolable law of distribution of anything including pending cases and delivery of justice.

That being the case, the first step is for the courts to segregate the total number of pending cases in the country as a whole, to long time (L), medium time (M) and short time (S) consuming cases. To do this, certain parameters have to be evolved and then applied to all pending cases in the country. The parameter should not include the time ( years and months ) for which the case is pending but should simply be the critical legal aspect involved – the prima facie legal maintainability- of the case. A committee of one judge or three judges, and the two advocates of the case should go into the legal merit of a case and establish the code mentioned above namely L, M, and S. The two parties involved may be present in this meeting, in addition to their advocates.

Some people may feel that this is not right but remember we are only classifying the cases as L,M and S and not delivering judgments as yet.

In a case, the party initiating the case may be innocent or the party defending it. Also the opposite may be true: the party initiating the case may be the culprit or the party defending it. The committee of 3 or 5 as suggested above should have (as all judges should have) equal respect and openness for the initiator of the case or the defendant. Such a committee will be able to come out with a decision as to whether there is a case at all to be taken up for further investigation, and which of the three categories – L, M or S- a case falls within just one sitting of this committee. If this is organized in the court room itself, the judge will be able to deliver the judgment in the very day of this hearing or at best in the very next hearing. I know many lawyers are nodding their head saying NO but the case study I am going to present at the end of this discussion will be an eye opener for everyone as to how many such cases are pending with no legal substance at all, and the suits are there only because one of the two parties get vindictive at the other. In this country it has become a practice for all people to take revenge against anyone by filing a suit against him/her. The justice delivery system in the country is misused by several people to deny justice to a party and the root cause for this again is the inordinate, non-excusable delay in the justice delivery system.

One may be surprised to know that one party, after listening to the committee, may decide not to pursue the case at all! In the least, this meeting will enable the judge to ask the vital few probing questions to be asked in subsequent hearings to establish the legality or otherwise of the case.

If the S cases are taken up first as above, there will be a rapid disposal of the current pending cases. Remember the S cases are 80% of the total cases pending.

Suggestion 9: Follow suggestion 8 for any case that is getting added anew i.e., fresh cases coming in today and any day from today in the future. This will proactively prevent pointless cases being admitted and clogging the already heavily clogged justice delivery system in the country.

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