The real punishment: Process, not verdict

Maybe it’s time we asked: When did the process of seeking justice become more painful than the crime?

- Anand Prasad

When we talk about criminal justice in India, most people think about the final verdict — whether someone is found guilty or innocent.

But for many ordinary Indians, punishment is not in the verdict, but in the process itself. The waiting, the uncertainty, the endless hearings, and the years spent behind bars before a case even reaches a conclusion. The real punishment often begins long before the judge ever speaks.

In theory, our law says, “bail is the rule, jail is the exception.” But in the present times, it feels like the opposite. Getting bail today has become harder than before. As a result, thousands of people who havent been proven guilty are stuck in jail for years, waiting for their trial to end. According to government data, there are nearly four lakh undertrial prisoners in India — that means almost four lakh people behind bars who havent been convicted yet. For many of them, the not guilty in particular, their only crime appears to be being caught in a system that moves painfully slow.

If you visit any of the lower courts, you'll see what this means. Families waiting outside courtrooms for years, hoping for a hearing that keeps getting postponed. Lawyers juggling multiple cases because of endless delays. People selling their land or borrowing money just to pay legal fees. And all this time, the accused, who may or may not be guilty, sits in a small, overcrowded cell, cut off from the world. Sometimes by the time their name is cleared, their youth, their reputation, and their hopes are already gone, and they have no compensation of such incarceration.