Errantry - Jury Trials

If there is one thing that has consistently piqued my interest and curiosity, and I am sure it is true for many others, it is jury trials in India and their phasing out. I blame it on the Nanavati Case, a perfect blend of all that makes criminal trials irresistible (anyone interested in the story may want to read In Hot Blood).

The story is well known: A naval-officer husband dropped his wife and children to the theatre, went and got himself a weapon from his ship, then started looking about for his wife's paramour in South Bombay. The husband, K.M. Nanavati, went to the house of the paramour, Prem Ahuja. Nanavati went straight for Ahuja's room after confirming he was home, locked it behind him, and then three shots were heard. He left as swiftly as he came, and went straight to the police to turn himself in. Well, almost. 

The case was sensational material for news and even more so for the tabloids which lapped it up from all angles. After a quick investigation, Nanavati was tried before a jury for the murder of Prem Ahuja, which acquitted him. The verdict was sent up to the Bombay High Court by the Sessions Judge. A Division Bench of the High Court set aside the acquittal and held that there was enough evidence to conclude that Nanavati was guilty of murder.

According to folklore, Nanavati's legacy to the Indian criminal process was the eventual condemnation of the jury trial. The last jury trial, which convinced the powers-that-be that a fickle public which returned perverse verdicts contrary to available evidence could not be trusted with dispensing justice. Henceforth, the criminal trial would be the provenance of the trained judge, to ensure such errors are not repeated.

Existing scholarship by James Jaffe and Kalyani Ramnath, amongst others, has already debunked some myths around Nanavati being the 'last' jury trial, as well as it being the determinative factor leading to the demise of that system of being judged by one's peers. In this short post, I want to add to this small but very fascinating area of work by positing two separate points which appear to have not been commented upon.

First, the judgment of the High Court convicting Nanavati of murder is misunderstood as having fired a broadside at the idea of jury trials in India. Sure, it held that the verdict of the jury was perverse, but this was not because of some inherent fault that it found in the system. Rather, both Justices Shelat and Naik in their separate opinions held that one big reason for the jury's incorrect conclusions was that the trial judge had misdirected the jury on several key points of fact and law. In other words, the jury was not per se bad or perverse, but it had rendered a perverse verdict being misdirected on how to treat some crucial parts of the evidence. This, then, makes the verdict a condemnation of the judge as much as the jury, dynamically altering the received wisdom about the trial itself. This re-appreciation of what Nanavati actually held, as opposed to what it has come to stand for, contributes to the laregely untapped area of scholarship on how a nascent Indian state treated the jury trial.

Flowing from the first we come to the second point, which is that even if we assume that the Nanavati jury had deliberately returned a verdict contrary to the evidence, it is arguably unidimensional to view this as a singularly bad outcome. A history of the jury trial in England shows us that the duty of the jury was not to return a verdict that was only in agreement with the law, but also return a verdict which was in agreement with its conscience, and it was the bounden duty of the system to respect such a 'perverse verdict'. In other words, a jury returning perverse verdicts was not a glaring error pointing to a breakdown but a part of the process. It should come as no surprise that the colonial government was not-too-happy in securing the jury trial in its fullest glory for India. Contrary to established practice in England the Indian criminal procedure code allowed presiding judges to disagree with a jury and refer its verdict to the High Court for a final decision (section 307 of the 1898 Code). It was this same procedure which was adopted in Nanavati's case by the Sessions Judge, reflecting its ordinariness from a procedural perspective.

So here is an alternative history in Nanavati. Maybe the system did not flounder in the case any more than it does in any sensational case.