Punishing the guilty and protecting the innocent

There is a man or a woman not far from your home who is perhaps licking the edge of a knife, fondling with a loaded gun or planning a scheme to make you vanish into thin air. You may have your high regard for your system of morality and laws. You may think that there are law enforcement agencies to protect you from the harm's ways or you have a maternal uncle having links with the powerhouses to guard you from impending dangers. If you are so confident you may soon prove yourself to be a dupe. People bent on transferring you forever away from this planet are more intelligent than you think you are and more powerful than your maternal uncle who purportedly has links with the high-ups. They are smart enough to pull the wool over the law enforcers' eyes.
Nobody would deny the fact that our society has of late become a haven for criminals and their masterminds who get shelter and protection from those who are supposed to fight the crimes. Maybe, the law enforcement in our country is lax due to lack of police workforces compared to high incidences of crimes in areas of dense populations. Maybe, the police are otherwise helpless for some other indescribable rhymes or reasons.
The abnormal increase in the forced disappearances in the recent years and frequencies of other, mostly unreported, macabre crimes being committed in Bangladesh bears the testimony to such fears.
Crimes have fascinated thriller writers like Agatha Christie to write fictions like Poirot and actors like David Suchet to play his sterling role of Hercule Poirot in the famous British TV series, winning hearts of millions of readers and TV viewers all over the world.
One may wonder how Agatha Christie, if she were alive today, would have grasped the present crime patterns in our country, and for that matter in other countries where the rule of law is just a mockery, and attempted to dig out the real masterminds who are working behind the crime scenes and how, based on the crime patterns of our country, she could portray such felonies through one of her fictions that David Suchet, in an additional episode of the TV series, could star in his eponymous role as a private detective! I guess it would have been impossible even for Agatha Christie to stretch her imaginations to write a fiction or for a powerful actor like David Suchet to play a role on. The reason is quite obvious.
Crimes that we read about in the newspapers or view about in the television news are mostly reported, not necessarily detected. Many such reported crimes that are ostensibly being tried in the fair courts of law may in fact hide the real crimes in many instances, leaving the actual criminals scot-free.
There are, of course, undetected crimes being committed everywhere in the world. There are murders in countries that are passed off as suicides or as accidents in crossfire between runaway criminals and police personnel or as even deaths by natural causes. There are crimes that, although detected, are committed in such an intelligent fashion that there won't be enough evidence for the authorities to conclusively solve it. This can also include leaving behind misleading or contradictory evidences, or evidences that are quickly wiped out or covered up.
In a developed country like in America a veteran criminal has to take a lot of precautions like wearing gloves and adopting other clever means while committing a crime to evade forensic investigations. Still, criminals are regularly being nabbed in America as there is strict rule of law here where an enforcer or a judge is accountable, not purchasable.
But in a country where charges can fancifully be framed against anybody and witnesses easily manufactured committing crimes is just a cakewalk.
There are scores of criminal cases in America and elsewhere in the world where one found guilty of heinous crimes like murder and sentenced to death has been for years on death row and then further sophisticated DNA testing did cast doubt on his conviction and ultimately saved his life and convicted the real guilty man. Recent DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system even in the United States by exposing how often the innocent are convicted and the guilty walk free.
But in a country where passers-by are randomly picked and charged with crimes that they never committed and in some cases are sentenced to death or life in prison probability of re-examination or retrial of their cases is terribly thin, let alone exonerations.
In many criminal cases in our country evidences are regularly corrupted by suggestive witness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable documentations, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive biases, and poor lawyering.
There are innocent people in our country who cannot really afford money or power to prove their innocence. There may be hundreds of wrongfully convicted people who may be rotting in many of our jails or passing their horrible moments on death rows.
There are revealing patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error in the judicial systems of many developing countries, including ours, where weaknesses are built into the criminal justice system. There is always a question in public mind in a country like ours whether the justice system has become distant, unaccountable and unanswerable.
Criminal justice systems need to strike a balance between punishing the guilty and protecting the innocent. With that end in view there should also be an end to death penalty that constitutes an irreversible denial of human rights in a judicial system which is often riddled and tainted with human errors that may risk execution of innocent people. The death penalty, unlike prison sentences, is irreversible and irreparable and therefore should be done away with.
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