Crime without punishment?

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Michael Conahan & Mark Ciavarella, leave the federal courthouse in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009. Prosecutors say Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in lockups run by PA Child Care LLC and a sister company, Western PA Child Care LLC. (Photo: www.reflector.com)


We know to our cost that democracy breeds corruption. Because it happens at all levels and at all times in India, we think this is an Indian phenomenon. But watch the scene for a few weeks and we'll see how even America, the "land of the free," is gripped by corruption.

Voluntary organisations like Countercurrents and Social Conscience may sometimes exaggerate their case. The headline of one of their articles is: "America is spelt c-o-r-r-u-p-t-i-o-n." But they make their point. The power of lobbies is so great that the entire political structure is open to manipulation. Lobbying is legally recognised and has become perhaps the biggest industry in Washington DC. It works by offering all kinds of incentives to legislators. Naturally a tradition developed whereby America was run by its giant corporations. There are also political influence groups like the Jewish lobby and the Gun lobby. Even in medical and legal fields bribery is recognised as a serious problem.

But America does not drown in this sea. It stays afloat. The reason is that very often the guilty get punished. Richard Nixon was forced to resign. George Bush has become a detested figure rivaled only by his Vice President Dick Cheney who is seen as an evil genius who masterminded the Iraq war for personal profit.

True, these men were not punished as they should have been. Nixon was granted a full pardon by Gerald Ford who succeeded him. This meant that he was never prosecuted for his criminalities. Bush and Cheney will not be brought before the International Court or the War Crimes Tribunal to be tried for the killings and tortures they ordered.

These may be seen as an exception the American system allows for their presidents. At other levels, however, punishments follow crime. One big reason is that career civil servants function independently of politicians. Upon coming to power, a party does not start transferring civil servants to suit its political agenda. US attorneys in particular are known to pursue investigations without political pressure.

Not long ago, the Mayor of Detroit (mayors and governors in the US are executives with power over the police) was sent to jail for 99 days for corruption and assault. The Governor of Illinois was impeached out of office for bribery. There was no attempt to provide escape routes for these men. Nor was there any strategem to put a Rabri Devi in office when a Lalu Prasad was found guilty.

In a sensational case last month, two judges were arrested for kickbacks. This is a uniquely American case. There are private prisons in America run by private companies for profit. The profit depends on enough people being sentenced to jail. One judge in Pennsylvania conspired to get the necessary licence for the jail
concerned. The other judge began sentencing under-age children to prison even for minor offences like making fun of a teacher. The ironically named PA Child Care prison was soon full, each inmate paying $314 per day. The judges got more than $2 million in kickbacks. Now both will get seven years in jail, lose their pensions and face prosecutions by hundreds of families whose children had their lives ruined by the criminal judgements.

Another judge in Mississippi, arrested for corruption, was produced in jail in handcuffs and leg chains.

Several judges in India have been implicated in corruption cases. One was even impeached. But all escaped punishment. America's blessing is that exemplary punishment to the corrupt keep people's faith in the system alive. Countries that allow criminals to escape destroy the very system that sustains them.

Related Story: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/23/pennsylvania.corrupt.judges
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Why one man's conscience mattered to all

Hans Raj Khanna
Photo Credit : Supreme Court of India


Who is Free India's most courageous judge? We'll have to recall the terror of the Emergency era to appreciate Hans Raj Khanna's claim to that title.

Those were days when the police could pick up any one and torture or kill him and no questions could be asked. There would be no information either, for news was censored, telephones tapped. People were scared to meet in street corners or coffee shops. Fear stalked the land; there were informers everywhere.

Today's generation would hardly believe that such conditions existed in India. They not only did; Indira Gandhi's India was quite brazen about it. The day after Emergency was imposed, a Presidential Order specifically deprived citizens of the most fundamental of all rights _ the right to life, liberty and equality. As in Stalin's Russia and Pinochet's Chile.

As a wave of arrests swept across the country, many did approach the courts. As many as nine High Courts ruled that courts could hear habeas corpus petitions. The Supreme Court ruled otherwise. It justified the Government's arbitrary powers and the denial of citizen's right to seek judicial remedy. In a five-member bench, it was a four-to-one majority judgement. The One was Justice H.R. Khanna.

The Supreme Court judgement of August 28, 1976, will remain a document of disgrace in our history. The four judges mangled their commonsense, to say nothing of their judicial instincts, in their effort to defend the illegal autocracy of the Government.

Justice M.H. Beg, for example, made the astonishing statement that "the care and concern with which the State is looking after detenues who are well-housed, well-fed and well-treated is almost maternal." Even as that insult to maternal virtues was being written, George Fernandes' brother was being tortured in Karnataka and engineering student Rajan was being beaten to death by the Kerala police _ to mention just two of thousands of such cases.

In a few months, Beg, with no sense of shame, accepted the post of Chief Justice of India. It was not his due, for H.R. Khanna was the senior most. But in an outrageously undemocratic moment of history, an outrageously unjudicial judge got his thirty pieces of silver. It is not known whether Beg had the decency of Judas Iscariot to repent in due course.

Khanna of course resigned. But he could hold his head high because he had summoned the courage, alone among five, to honour his oath, his conscience and the faith of his countrymen in the judiciary. He not only upheld the inalienable rights of man to life and liberty. He also quoted an American judge to assert that "a dissent in a court of last resort is an appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of a future day when a
later decision may possibly correct the error into which the dissenting judge believes the court has strayed."

We proudly enjoy our freedoms today because of the brooding spirit of men like H.R. Khanna. Last week Justice Khanna, aged 95, died peacefully in his sleep. The gods blessed him. Observe a moment's silence in salute to his soul.