Trust in justice

Trust in justice

Why, asked a tearful mother last week, was the rapist and murderer of her six-year-old daughter jailed for only 20 years? The South Sulawesi district court judge, a woman, replied: "Justice had been done." But for the bereaved mother it did not appear that this was so. Other people, too, might feel that the court has failed to act as the last bastion of the people.

Unlike other crimes, rape leaves the victim with deep, life- long scars.

In spite of the many calls, notably from women's organizations, for judges to get tougher on rapists, no judge has yet deemed it necessary to impose the maximum penalty of 12 years imprisonment, for rape, and death, for rape-murder. It is widely recognized that rape trials often encounter serious evidentiary difficulties and that gaining a confession from a rapist is no easy job, but even in clear-cut cases judges have been very lenient.

Another widely discussed rape case was heard by the Bogor district court last year. A 22-year-old man stood trial on charges of raping and murdering a college student. It transpired that he had attacked her after being carried away by the bedroom scenes in a locally made film he had just seen. There was a public uproar. He was sentenced to only 15 years in jail.

Such lenience is doubtless one of the reasons why many public prosecutors appeal to the High Courts and the Supreme Court from verdicts in the lower courts. Defendants naturally take advantage of their automatic right of appeal when the verdict goes against them. Chief Justice Soerjono, who took over from Purwoto S. Gandasubrata recently, inherited a backlog of 16,000 appeal cases. On top of these, 2,000 new appeals are lodged with his office every year. This is a great burden to the 51 Supreme Court judges, who have been working day and night to hear the cases.

Soerjono recently complained about the habit of appealing against verdicts in almost all cases. The reason might be that people have little faith in the judges of the courts of first instance. So they have even appealed in civil cases involving ridiculously small amounts of money.

This problem is not found in advanced countries such as the United States. In those countries people have come to put their trust in local and district courts and appeal only in very complicated cases. Former Chief Justice Purwoto said recently that this was also the case in Indonesia in the 1950s.

Today, however, many people seem to have been disillusioned with our courts, as President Soeharto himself confirmed yesterday. And the emergence of this state of affairs has been made possible because judges are obliged to base their verdicts on their own conscience alone.

At a recent discussion with members of the Jakarta Lawyers' Club Purwoto said that in the 1950s the people still held judges in very high esteem. What he did not say is: Judges' salaries were considerably higher then. Only very recently has the government increased their salaries. We believe that this is an important step in ensuring judicial independence.

As fellow human beings we understand how a judge trying a corruption case involving billions of rupiah must feel when he compares the amounts with his monthly salary.

However, the salary increase does not, in itself, guarantee fairer trials. There must be an effective system of supervision. This has, hitherto, been difficult to achieve in this country because the supervising officers have usually been no cleaner than those they have been supervising.

But in the judicial field efficacy of supervision is a must. And judges convicted of receiving bribes deserve heavier punishment than others.

Finally, the Supreme Court should pay attention to the question of judges' "conscience", because up to now a common standard has been lacking. Different judges have handed down different verdicts on the same facts. Such instances will confuse seekers after justice even further.