The Supreme Court said criminal trials ideally need active and dynamic judges rather than reticent or taciturn ones.
“Reticence may be good in many circumstances, but a judge remaining mute during trial is not an ideal situation. A taciturn judge may be the model caricatured in public mind. But there is nothing wrong in his becoming active or dynamic during trial so that criminal justice being the end could be achieved,” a three-judge Bench of Justices B.R. Gavai, J.B. Pardiwala and P.K. Mishra highlighted.
The judgment, authored by Justice Pardiwala, concerned an appeal by a man facing the death penalty for the rape and murder of a 10-year-old.
Justice Pardiwala said the case was riddled with inconsistencies that neither the public prosecutor nor the trial judge had cared to point out. In one instance, the contradictions concerned who had actually lured the victim out of her house.
The Supreme Court said the court’s silence regarding these disparities, even when the case came up in appeal before the Patna High court, was “shocking”. The case has been returned to the High Court for a fresh look.
“If a criminal court is to be an effective instrument in dispensing justice, the presiding judge must cease to be a spectator and a mere recording machine. He must become a participant in the trial by evincing intelligent active interest by putting questions to witnesses in order to ascertain the truth,” Justice Pardiwala observed.
Section 165 of the Evidence Act confers vast and unrestricted powers on the trial court to put “any question he pleases, in any form, at any time, of any witness, or of the parties, about any fact relevant or irrelevant” in order to discover facts.
The judgment said a judge should not think that his role is merely that of an umpire in the contest between the prosecution and defence in a trial.
“No doubt a judge has to remain very vigilant, cautious, fair and impartial, and not to give even the slightest of impression that he is biased or prejudiced either due to his own personal convictions or views in favour of one or the other party. This, however, would not mean that the judge will simply shut his own eyes and be a mute spectator,” Justice Pardiwala wrote.
