Wrongful Conviction and State Responsibility in This Regard:
Nowadays, Wrongful Conviction frequent event in our country in criminal cases. A person who has not Committed any crime but unfortunately convicted by the court and detrain in the jail. According to the National instate of justice, there is two way to found a wrongful conviction. They are as follows:
- The person convicted is factually innocent of the charges.
- There were procedural errors that violated the convicted person's rights.
In this assignment, we will talk about the second one. Many convictions occur in our country due to the procedural fact. Even if criminal procedure cover all the procedure but lack of many proper implementation of criminal procedure for example wrong investigation by the police or lack of proper consideration by the judge many innocent people convicted by the court. There are many cases where the higher judiciary gave acquittal to many persons who were wrongfully convicted in the lower court. A news from Dhaka Tribune said An innocent day laborer, who spent the last 17 years wrongfully accused in a case and spent time behind bars, has at last been acquitted and released from jail. He was suffering all this years due to wrong investigation of police.in the first court he (Bablu Sheikh) held to two years imprisonment and with compensation. After appeal to the higher court he was held innocent. The court also said in his judgment that he can seek compensation to the higher court. In 2011 the HCD from 41 criminal cases acquit the accused in 24 cases. It means that 58.53% of total case are acquitted its accused and only 14 cases maintain the verdict of lower court. Punishments were reduced in 3 criminal cases. From the report of 2012 from the 19 criminal cases HCD gave acquittal in 10 cases and 5 cases maintain the decision of lower court and in 4 cases punishment were reduced by the HCD. From 2016 from the total 7 cases 6 cases were death sentence from which 4 death sentences were reduced and 2 remain the same. It means only 28.57% decision of lower judiciary were remain same and 57.14% were reduced. In 2017 the HCD among 10 criminal appeals, death references, and jail appeals 13 person in 4 appeals get acquittal. However, 3 cases maintain the same decision made by the lower judiciary. All this report show that there are number of wrong conviction which given by the lower court.
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State responsibility in Regard of Wrongful Conviction:
Every prison has a hope of exoneration. This type of things is more need in an erroneously incarcerated matter. In our country if a person got acquittal from the case he can walk away but in the society has already had a bad impression. He got a questionable character. Criminal procedure does not provide any provision to this matter. In Bangladesh, the illegally convicted person has two incidental remedial possibilities under the prevailing legal system. Such as they have an opportunity of filing Tort law suit based on false imprisonment or malicious cases or abuse of process and the other one gave by the constitution Article 44 and 102. But this two remedy actually very time consuming and costly process that’s why most of the people don’t file a suit. But some case of compensation for the wrong conviction show a good result such as, In CCB Foundation case the HCD granted compensation of taka 20, 00000/ to the parents of victim named ‘jihad’ against the government for violating his constitutional right under article 32. Beside this to remedy State don’t have any legal provision in this regard. Government should take measures and create a special legal provision to reduce the wrongful conviction.
Delay in the Criminal Adjudication and Backlogs:
The word delay means over consuming time in Criminal justice system. In another way we can say that exceeding the time fixed for the trial in criminal adjudication. On the other hand, Delay cause to be slowed down or delayed; act later than planned, scheduled, or required; time during which some action is awaited. According to a source about 2.3 million cases were pending in our country and in the Appellate Division 16219 case pending in 2012. A number of Articles were written in regard of backlogs and lengthy process but no effective measures were taken by the government.
Cause of delay in Criminal Justice in Bangladesh:
In criminal system there are many problems to deliver the proper justice to the parties. Crisis of Judges is a reasonable factor. In our country we have 160 million of people and fro them there is not sufficient number of Judges. For almost 0.13 million people we have only one criminal judge to serve. Another reasonable factor was inefficient number of criminal courts. For that reason large numbers of backlogs are pending in the criminal courts. In this regard, criminal procedure did not give any provision. Although number of judges should be maintain as a procedural law but criminal procedure have no provision in regard of this issue.
Filing of false cases:
According to the law everyone has a right to sue. With this right many people misuse it and file false cases against innocent person. For that reason criminal court faced many malicious prosecutions and bogus cases. As I said earlier we have a crisis of criminal court and these false cases led the criminal adjudication to overburden. Under this circumstance, it is necessary to increase the number of court.
Problems inside the judiciary:
In the criminal adjudication, the number of judicial officers is too low. For that reason a number of judges play duel role in the judiciary like they divide a day into two parts such as civil and criminal. They hear civil cases along with criminal case. Inefficient number of judges might create a large number of backlogs. Due to duel role played by the judges they had a possibility to incriminate a person who is innocent because they may get confused with the cases.
Insufficient of logistical, administrative, and technical resources:
In our country logistical support are in another cause of delay in the criminal adjudication. We never get enough budget to provide proper justice to the people. Within the Judicial budget, we have to manage our criminal adjudication. For that reason, we have inadequate human resources, insufficient infrastructural support, shortage of technical assistance, and limited budget for technical skill-building which led to the lengthy process in the criminal adjudication.
Concluding Observation:
Lastly, I might say that The Code of Criminal procedure 1898 cover all the procedure about criminal case. It has a very much good review theoretically but in practicing the code, there has some different implementations in our country. it has successfully provide a proper procedure and explain how to use it but some government employee like police and other judicial officer in some point abuse it. This abuse occurs due to some unexplained matter in the code. But overall this code tries to assured a fair trial in Bangladesh.
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