India Needs its Own Model of the Jury System

It is said that “an hour of justice is better than a hundred of prayer” the supreme court of India had taken a well considered decision in ordering a retrial of the Best Bakery case in Maharashtra as Gujarat was not found conducive to a fair trial.

It is time for national rethinking on the lines as to how to ensure fair trials and rule out any possibilities of collusion between the accused and the prosecution.  It is time one thought of giving a try to the jury system in instances of heinous crimes and of genocide.

The English jury generally date back to around the magna carta in 1215.  In trial by jury the judgment being by ones’ peers’, it was intended to act as a restraint on Royal Action. The cut off date of 1215 as the beginning of the jury system is important since earlier to this guilt or innocence was decided in various ways, the most common being trial by battle or by a similar method.

In England and the Wales, the jury alone would decide innocence or guilt by deliberating in secret and forming a collective view on facts to form a verdict.  As far as the verdict is concerned, after the jury retires, none may interfere, and historically, as illustrated by Pope, juries were locked in a room to deliberate their verdict without food or drink.  The facts of a case were always the province of the jury and the judges role was limited to decide the law.  The judge would give the jury appropriate directions on the law and sum up the facts to the jury.  English juries played no part in the sentencing process.

In some situations the role of jury trial exceeded beyond the juries role of being ‘fair fact finders’ at criminal trials.  This has been depicted by K. Dubrovskys’ observations regarding the jury in BUSHELL’S case in 1670 whereby he remarked that jury’s role was instrumental in establishing freedom of religion, the right to free assembly and freedom of speech.

We in India could also try to experiment with limiting the role of jury to ‘fair fact finding’ in criminal matters of vital importance.  To make the system more effective, the jury could be selected from a panel of local people of high stature. The experiment of the jury system in India keeping the various social and economic factors in view while developing the model tailor made to Indian conditions would be a good idea in which we all have nothing to loose.