Criminal Justice — A Reform Technique

The administration of criminal law and justice requires complete refurbishing. Recent years have been a growing urge for improving the state of affairs in this domain. There is no gainsaying that problematic issues requiring thoughtful research have arisen in this field of public law. The Government itself is seized with this matter. The Law Commission had already been engaged in the study of reforms of criminal procedure.

The Report has been released lately. The study of Indian Penal Code for revisional purposes is already underway.

Though it would not be fair to prejudge the value of the recommendations and reports of the Law Commission in this significant area, nonetheless it can be doubted whether the recommendations have any bearing of those objective conditions which pervade the enforcement of law and the administration of justice at initial levels. Community responses aroused as a result of prevailing conditions ; experiences and difficulties of law enforcement officers and the considered views of men in the legal profession, who are endowed with the task of balancing the competing values, viz the security of society vis-a-vis the dignity of human personality, need be injected in the law revision programme in order to import realism. However, any such study not being available so far it is possible that one may find an element of realism in the recommendations of Law Commission merely by way of chance. But these prestigious reports and recommendations do generally find smooth passage in the Legislature in the shape of amending bills.

It may be noted that in the last century the needs and exigencies of administration had asked for the replacement of Mohammedan Criminal Jurisprudence. Accordingly, with the passing of the Charter Act, 1833, the first Law Commission was set up under a noted Benthamite-Lord Macaulay who also undertook the task of drafting the Penal Code for India.

The material for the Code was drawn from various sources including the Napoleon Code and the Livingstone Code of Louisiana. The fabrication of the Penal Code did require the sagacity and acumen of a lawyer who had imbibed the dominant social philosophy of the nineteenth century and who could use his skill to blend the prejudices and predilections of the Indian people with the alien rules of common law and continental jurisprudence in a way that the Code appeared to be an indigenous product. This event of Indian legal history spells out a technique of law reform ; and before a large scale reform is ventured in the area of criminal law and justice it is incumbent upon the Indian jurisprudents to re-acquaint themselves with this very valuable technique of legal research which already has yielded concrete results in the past.