I dance to your tune

A verdict on a juvenile criminal, a day writing a legal report and the night now, reflecting on what law means to me. In a country where there are scores of people who are ignorant of what is in store for them, there are a plenty debating on how to sail through in this ocean of laws. Laws which have meaning to some, and to some only a red letter. On the one hand there are those who know laws. On the other for whom ignorance of law is no excuse. Coming from a family where there are no law makers, I can understand what law means to a common man. I am a lawyer. But I cannot forget what law means to me as a person whose mother kept fighting on the courts of law for her promotions and pay fixations, whose father always respected these people called lawyers, and what today I am. Coming back to the juvenile’s case who got freed today, I wonder what age, time and intelligence we perceive of when we allow people to go free after committing a crime. Law has its loopholes. No doubt. Regulations are a plenty. There are open slits from which escapees can pass through. Law has its limitations. And ambiguities. While ambiguities can be interpreted for justice, the limitations bind the hands of the judges. They cannot go beyond what the law is. Law is the verdict of the masses. Period. The Indian Penal Code, for example, has been the child of a plethora of minds which worked together to form a legal framework for persons and entities committing crimes. Entities. Yes. Because Corporations can commit crimes too. However they cannot be punished with physical confinement. So is a child who is not an adult in the eyes of law. A child criminal has to be reformed. That is the idea of law. Intent of a child cannot be gauged merely by coupling the actusreus written in the section on the statute book. Statutory crimes are an example of how intention is not essential for committing certain crimes. On the other hand, crimes with intentions are exempted for those for whom the policy of the State is different from the others. Children who are criminals as a matter of policy have to be treated differently. And a crime like this should not prompt policy makers to change the reformist approach used in criminal law to a punitive one. Hard cases make bad law. Period. However again, according to latest research a child’s brain is developing faster than to have previously thought. A child of 14 is more mature than a child of 14, 20 years back. He or she knows the consequences of the act.

Now let me tell this from the perspective of the victim. I remember the day when she left this world to another world where she could forget her pain. Yes she was in pain. And my eyes wept. And wept. So did everybody I knew. For once she had become the daughter and sister of a nation with high crime records. Perhaps the offenders were the only people who did not weep. They were those who did not think twice before that gory rape. I get goosebumps thinking of what Nirbhaya must have gone through on that ominous night. Who will not. We all have been witness to what happened. And her friends, her mother and her father too, for whom there was light at the end of the tunnel in the form of justice. Justice in reality. Justice by bringing the culprits to greater punishments than what law could inflict. Justice by seeking sympathy of the judges. Justice in true color. However, law is one thing and justice another.