You May Be a Victim of a Corrupt Judge

Think justice is always served? Think again. A corrupt judge could be the reason you lost your case — and you may never even know it.

On a regular day, we read and hear of multiple incidents reported through various news and articles. Do we understand the real impact of those incidents on and around us? This article is an attempt to make you realise the actual impact of one such shocking truth.

Corruption in the judiciary has been making headlines recently. Imagine you're caught in a legal dispute and turn to the court for relief. You endure the long, frustrating process for years, only to lose the case. You’re left confused—after all, you were truthful and innocent, and the facts clearly supported you. You tell yourself the law wasn’t on your side, or maybe it was just bad luck. But what if it was neither? What if your opponent bribed the judge—and that’s why you lost?

Can we imagine the damage and atrocities a corrupt judge can inflict? Let us see a few examples:

• If you own a property that is rightfully yours but somebody falsely claims it to be theirs and bribes the judge, you could end up losing your property.

• If you are a victim of a crime like murder, rape, kidnapping, narcotics, extortion, dacoity, etc., and if the offender bribes the judge, he will be wrongly released on bail or acquitted of the offence committed against you?

• If you are falsely accused of an offence like murder, rape, kidnapping, narcotics, extortion, dacoity, etc., and your opponent bribes the judge? You will lose your liberty and will be wrongly detained in custody for an offence not committed by you for a period which might last between a day and may be extended till the end of your life.

• If you are a woman and deserve alimony, child custody, etc., but your opponent bribes the judge, you will wrongly lose your alimony or custody of your child.

Can you imagine the pain and suffering one had to go through due to an experience similar to this? Maybe not, because you believe ‘YOU WILL NOT BE THE NEXT.’

The situation leaves us with some important questions unanswered:

• Whether all the judges who are accused of corruption are actually booked for the offence under the stringent laws of the land; if not, then why?

• Whether all the judges booked for the offence of corruption were efficiently prosecuted and convicted; if not, then why?

• Whether there is a possibility that even today, there are judges who are corrupt and are continuously inflicting the above atrocities on innocent people; if yes, then what?

• Whether all the cases previously decided by a corrupt judge in his career are rechecked, the person damaged because of his corrupt activities is appropriately compensated, and whether their rights are restored.

• There is a saying nowadays that justice is not what it is, but justice is what is delivered in court, then whatever it may be.

Is this a big scam? You are made to believe that the courts will deliver justice, and you are made to approach the courts, and then by accepting a bribe from your opponent, injustice is done to you. We cannot say that 100% of judges are corrupt, but we cannot say otherwise, either. So how are we going to know that the judge who is handling our matter is a corrupt one or a non-corrupt one?

We are in an era where we should say that “A Corrupt judge is not the one who accepts a bribe, but the one who gets caught for accepting a bribe.”

(The writer is a lawyer practicing in the Bombay High Court. Views personal.)