CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN INDIA

The system that deals with agencies of government that are responsible for
enforcing the law in the country, maintaining peace and harmony and treating
criminal conduct is known as the criminal justice system. The aim of the
criminal justice system is to ensure that every person who suffers an injury or
loss at the hand of others is allowed to present his case and seek justice. The
aim of the Criminal Justice System is to punish the guilty and protect the
innocent. Although the broad contours of the Criminal justice system are
seldom codified, these can be inferred from different statutes, including the
Constitution and judicial pronouncements. In a democratic civilized society, the
Criminal Justice System is expected to provide the maximum sense of security
to the people at large by dealing with crimes and criminals effectively, quickly
and legally.

More specifically, the aim is to reduce the level of criminality in society by

ensuring maximum detection of reported crimes, conviction of the accused
persons without delay, awarding appropriate punishments . Presently, our
criminal justice is archaic, obsolete, and oppressive, which faces heavy criticism
when issues of human rights are raised at national and international fora. These
criticisms come not only from our human rights activists, scholars, writers,
journalists, the chieftains of criminal justice, but also from International sources
like Amnesty International, World Watch, etc. The situation is worsening
because two-third of the criminal justice system comprises of policy and prisons
that quite often violate human rights and perpetuates human wrongs, and the
tiny one-third comprises of the judiciary (largely through apex court) tries to
protect and promote human rights.
There are countless numbers of reports on chilling human rights abuses of the
pre-emergency era and emergency era, which have emerged from indigenous
sources. The successive convergence of these reports represents continuing
patterns of abuse in the administration of criminal justice in the country. The
reports mainly focus on torture, including custodial rapes and deaths. The
reports criticize blatantly unconstitutional practices. The two-third sub-systems
blame the apex court and some of its human rights-minded judges as a bleeding-
heart liberal, impractical idealists, arm-chair theoreticians, etc. The court, on the
contrary, churns out judgments and judgments, which fret at the derelictions of
police and prisons. The result is that our system of criminal justice has a double
face; one harms and the other tries to heal.
There is a need to improve the quality of forensic expertise and make it truly a
system for the promotion of justice. The evidence obtained by scientific
investigation may also be excluded on grounds of violation of the Evidence Act
or restrictions prescribed by the constitution. The police, the Government and
the society each have a role to play in improving the law enforcement situation
and in developing human rights-friendly police in the country. A lot can be
accomplished to commute public perceptions and to ameliorate the standards of
policing if the leadership in the police organization is wholly committed to
reform.
There must be socio-legal research in various areas of criminal law to afford
guidance to the courts in their none-too easy of laying down the law which
would best serve the interest of the society, without relinquishing the interest of
the innocent. The institution of the National Human Rights Commission can
contribute if, instead of becoming a face-saving device against international
criticism of human rights conditions, it dedicates itself sincerely to the detection
of human rights violations in crime control activity and actuates itself towards
corrective and remedial steps.
A reconciliation lies in improving the domestic culture of rights which in turn
will replenish our image on the international platform also. Thus, it can be
concluded that to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms of the
accused, we must generate awareness for human rights in people’s minds,
otherwise, the concept of human rights will zigzag one step forward, and two
steps back.