05/23/2022
Lawyers and Judges, around the world, are opposed to Common Citizens deciding what the Law is, who is Guilty and who not! --
Oct 1, 2020
8 min read
‘Not The Right People’: Why Jury Trials were Abolished in India
- James Jaffe *
Finally, in January 1961, a bill to abolish jury trials in Bombay City was moved in the Maharashtra State Assembly and eventually passed later that year, but only after “the Bombay High Court had advised the State Government that the jury system had outlived its utility and had recommended that it should be discontinued in Bombay too.”[8]
Throughout this period, the opposition to jury trials was fostered most often by leading members of the judiciary. Their underlying argument was not solely about caste or foreign transplants, or communal divisions, or even the length and expense of jury trials. Almost invariably, their argument could be reduced to the claim that there were not enough educated and literate people in India to qualify as jurors. In an influential report out of Uttar Pradesh in 1950, K. N. Wanchoo, then on the Allahabad High Court and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, explained that there was not “a sufficient number of the right class of people” to serve as jurors in the State.[9] Thus, trial by jury should be abolished there and, by implication, elsewhere.
The notion that were not enough of ‘the right type of people’ to serve as jurors was a constant refrain in the debates about trial by jury after Independence.
