Long wait for the lady justice in India

This is an interesting article from the International Herald Tribune on the inordinate delays in the Indian courts in hearing cases. The article starts by stating that:

“The investigation into India's deadliest terrorist attack, in 1993, has dragged on so long that 12 of the accused have died, mostly in gang wars. Among the remaining 123 still alive, a handful have been imprisoned so long - longer than their probable sentence - that a guilty verdict could set them free.

On Thursday, a judge is to begin ruling in the case, which spawned one of the world's longest trials and has come
to symbolize India's crawlingly slow justice.

It was 13 years ago that 13 bombs exploded in this coastal megalopolis, mangling buses and buildings and killing 257 people. Within months, people had been jailed by the dozen. The police quickly detailed a plot implicating homegrown Islamic radicals, Pakistani intelligence operatives, a Dubai-based mafia don and a suave Bollywood hero.”

The article sums up the present judiciary situation as following:

• Security experts say India's courts are easy for terrorists to manipulate.
• The defenders of India's courts say they are slow because they were built on the Anglo-Saxon principle of innocent until proven guilty.
• Human rights groups say that for those at the bottom of the Indian social ladder, delay gives the accused too little freedom, resulting in the poor being be jailed on a flicker of suspicion and made to wait years for their day in court.

Read the article titles Justice isn't just slow in India, it crawls here.