Bhopal Verdict: Two-Year Sentence, $2,100 Fine

Usually, the end of a 25-year-old legal battle affords a sense of closure or relief. Not so in the case of Bhopal, which culminated yesterday in renewed grief after the defendants were sentenced to just two years in prison, with an additional fine of $2,100 — this for a disaster that killed thousands of people.

The 1984 chemical leak at central India's Union Carbide plant killed some 3,000 people instantaneously, and thousands more died from the aftereffects of the gas. The government says that nearly 600,000 people were affected by the gas leak. Many of Bhopal's victims have grown old waiting for accountability, and one of the eight Union Carbide defendants had already passed away by the time the verdict issued.

Though the defendants were first charged with culpable homicide, which could carry a sentence of up to 10 years, India's Supreme Court changed the charges to death by negligence, a charge most often brought in deaths that involve car accidents.

As victims advocate Satinath Sarangi says, the Indian courts effectively reduced the "world’s worst industrial disaster...to a traffic accident."

Today, Bhopal's not just a symbol of corporate malfeasance — it's also a reminder of the frailty of India's courts system, and the countless lives that are lost in its overall ebb and flow.

As I've written over on our Criminal Justice blog, India's system of justice is backlogged to the point that it's ground to a near-halt. The latest numbers indicate that Indian courts are still waiting to process over 31 million cases — which, at the going rate, one High Court judge estimates would take 320 years to clear.

Victims, of course, don't have that long. Neither do the accused. Take, for example, Jagjivan Ram Yadav, a man accused of a 1968 murder. Yadav spent fully 38 years in jail awaiting trial, before finally securing release on bail at age 70.

Injustice for victims of Bhopal didn't just take the form of that fatal day in 1984. It also meant the months, years, and eventually decades of waiting, hoping for a response for the courts. It took three years for Indian officials to even investigate the incident, says India's Central Bureau of Investigation agency. Though the Bhopal chief judicial magistrate brought the "death by negligence" charges in 1997, it took the agency until 2005 to present the prosecution's case.  And so on, and so on. It was a labyrinthine case to track — until yesterday, some of the victims did not even realize that the charges being brought were so minimal.

One major reason for the backlog is the fact that currently, India has only 14,576 judges, or 10.5 per million people. By contrast, the U.S. has about 110 per million.

In the aftermath of the Bhopal verdict, some are proposing the creation of separate, fast-track courts for cases of particular urgency. Such a reform might have its place — but either way, it would still leave millions of people caught in India's labyrinthine system waiting.

Photo Credit: obbino