Judgement

KRISHNA IYER, J.:- Some basic issues bearing on prescription of punishments arise for judicial investigation in this criminal appeal where leave has been limited to tailoring the sentence by appellate review to fit the gravity of the delinquency and the redemption of the deviant.

2. The facts leading up to the conviction may need brief narration. The appellant along with another accused, deceived several desperate unemployed young men, received various sums of Rs. 1200/- by false pretences that they would secure jobs for them through politically influential friends and other make-believe representations. The offence of cheating under S. 420, I. P. C. was made out and conviction of both the accused followed. The 1st accused (appellant before us) is a young man around 28 years old and works as a Junior Assistant in the Planning and Financial Department of the Andhra Pradesh Secretariat and the other accused is his friend who personated as a State Port Officer. Before the trial court, there was a formal, almost pharisaic, fulfilment of the presentencing provision in Section 248 (2). Cr. P. C., 1973. The opportunity contemplated in the sub-section has a penological significance of far-reaching import, which has been lost on the trial Magistrate. For he disposed of this benignant obligation by brief ritual.

"I made of the accused that they were found guilty under Sec. 420, I. P. C. and the punishment contemplated thereof".

Reform of the black letter law is a time-lagging process. But judicial metabolism is sometimes slower to assimilate the spiritual substance of creative ideas finding their way into the statute book. This may explain why the appellate courts fell in line with the Magistrates mechanical approach and confirmed the condign punishment of 3 years rigorous imprisonment. At all the three tiers the focus was on the serious nature of the crime (cheating of young men by a government servant and his blackguardly companion) and no ray of light on the criminal or on the pertinent variety of social facts surrounding him penetrated the forensic mentation. The humane art of sentencing remains a retarded child of the Indian criminal system.

3. Now we enter the areas of punitive treatment of criminals, assuming that the guilt has been brought home. Certain elemental factors are significant strands of criminological thought. Since the whole territory of punishment in its modern setting is virtually virgin so far as our country is concerned we may as well go into the subject in some incisive depth for the guidance of the subordinate judiciary. The subject of study takes us to our cultural heritage that there is divinity in every man which has been translated into the constitutional essence of the dignity and worth of the human person. We take the liberty of making an Indian approach and then strike a cosmic note.

4. Progressive criminologists across the world will agree that the Gandhian diagnosis of offenders as patients and his conception of prisons as hospitals - mental and moral - is the key to the pathology of delinquency and the therapeutic role of punishment. The whole man is a healthy man and every man is born good. Criminality is a curable deviance. The morality of the law may vary, but is real. The basic goodness of all human beings is a spiritual axiom a fall-out of the advaita of cosmic creation and the spring of correctional thought in criminology.

5. If every saint has a past, every sinner has a future, and it is the role of law to remind both of this. The Indian legal genius of old has made a healthy contribution to the word treasury of criminology. The drawback of our criminal process is that often they are built on the bricks of impressionist opinions and dated values. Ignoring empirical studies and deeper researches.

6. India, like every other country, has its own crime complex and dilemma of punishment. Solutions to tangled social issues do not come like the crack of dawn but are the product of research and