The Verdictum

Bar & Bench will bring to you theVerdictum of each Judge of the Supreme Court, when she or he retires and will detail out the number of judgments and the number of days served at the Honourable Supreme Court..Justice Cyriac Joseph, who was the first judge to retire this year, has penned down only six judgments in 1300 days, during his tenure of roughly four years..The judiciary is entrusted with the responsibility of providing justice. The judges are figures of utmost respect and are hailed for the authority that they command, and their function. With the growing activism undertaken by the judiciary in every little aspect, there has been however, a dearth in the equally expanding responsibility to upkeep its dignity. In the age of criminalization of politics, the judiciary has also been blotted with similar marks of partiality and corruption..The recent allegations on judges point to a situation where the judiciary’s sanctity has severely been questioned. Huge amount of resources, including but not limited to monetary expenditures, are being channelized for increasing the efficiency of the judiciary..Bar & Bench henceforth will bring to you a Verdictum of each Judge of the Supreme Court, when she or he retires and will detail out the number of judgments and the number of days served at the Honourable Supreme Court..This being the first of the many Verdictums, Bar & Bench has analysed the tenure of as many as forty two judges and the data corresponding to their performance. Justice Cyriac Joseph (pictured), who was the first judge to retire this year, served from July 7, 2008 to Jan 27, 2012. According to the data compiled by Bar & Bench, Justice Cyriac Joseph has penned down only six judgments in 1,300 days, during his tenure of roughly four years..Even comparing Justice Joseph`s performance with his fellow judges, there seems to be a huge difference in number of judgments delivered. During Justice Joseph`s tenure, judges including Justice S. H. Kapadia, Justice Altamas Kabir, Justice Dalveer Bhandari, Justice D. K. Jain, Justice P. Sathasivam etc. have penned down more than sixty judgments each..Furthermore there is a marked difference, when compared to judges like Justice Arijit Pasayat and Justice S.B. Sinha, who have penned down as many as 426 and 336 judgments respectively. Although the number of judgments written by a judge cannot be seen as an exhaustive benchmark for their performance, it does provide certain indications. Among the serving judges there are some, such as Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai and Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar, for whom the time period considered for the data compilation was only a few months..N.B.: The data has been obtained from Supreme Court’s judgment database Judis and may be subject to minor variance. The research and compilation of data was done by Nikhil V. from GNLU, along with Deepti P., Rasheela Basheer, Vishnu Yuvaraj and Anoop K. from Government Law College, Calicut.Image Courtesy: The Hindu