A magistrate who defies death threats
By Mudliyar

Inoka Ranasinghe is a young Magistrate func tioning at the Teldeniya Magistrates Courts. On election day December 5, last year ten young Muslim supporters of Rauff Hakim were gunned down in cold blood at Udatalawinna. Ms. Ranasinghe though a junior magistrate had to perform her judicial functions with regard to the case as there is no provision in the Criminal Procedure Code that requires a case involving more than one killing be handled by the senior most magistrate in a given district.

I have always defended the judiciary in my columns. Even the most junior magistrates do perform their duties with great sincerity and purpose. Most of them have earned the respect and admiration of the public. Today the judiciary is one institution which is constantly under attack.

From all accounts Ms. Ranasinghe acted within her powers to prevent any abuse in the process which will negate the steadfast attitude in the delivery of justice adopted by most judges in the country. In the performance of her duties she had to displease many a quarter as the very nature of the case and the persons involved were such that it could give rise to various theories and notions which may offend one party or another. From the time she started hearing this case a galaxy of highly competent criminal lawyers presented both sides of the divide. One moved for bail and discharge of the accused on the basis that there was no evidence. The other strenuously argued the jurisdiction of a Magistrate Court to grant bail or discharge an accused in a murder case.

Under the old Criminal Procedure Code, which was introduced more than a hundred years ago, a magistrate had so much power and discretion that in an appropriate case he/she could bail out or discharge the accused. But the Bail Act which supersedes the Criminal Procedure Code had effectively made magistrates virtual clerks in a judicial cloak remanding people at the behest of the Police or the prosecution.

Though it is well known that no magistrate would ever dare to grant bail in a murder case where it is obvious to the Judge with legal training, that the evidence is probably false or had been given with the one intention of keeping in remand any person who has earned the wrath of suspicion of the prosecution, as the Bail Act prevents a magistrate from exercising his/her judicial discretion.

The white imperialists regarded ours as a country of compulsive liars and that lying under oath was a trivial affair. Therefore they regulated that neither the confession made to a police officer nor the statement by the kith and kin of the deceased should not be accepted without judicial scrutiny. Therefore the deprivation of liberty of the subject was given only to the Judiciary . The Judges of yesteryear had wide

discretion on matters that came before them in deciding whether a person should be incarcerated or not. But today there is a complete turn around, where a mere report filed under the letter "B" in Court takes away the sacred functions of the Judiciary. Ms. Ranasinghe therefore had no option but to remand every single suspect brought before her on the allegation that they were connected with the murder of ten Muslim youth at Udatalawinna.

But she was inundated with telephone calls threatening death to her and her immediate family members for not releasing the suspects on bail. There was racial acrimony as the youth murdered were Muslims and the accused were Sinhalese. One of the callers asked her whether she did not love her race and why she kept a Sinhala leader in remand. There was no respite.

Though she was a magistrate with the power of remanding a person brought before her for one year under the Bail Act and had every police officer saluting her, or lay people irrespective of his or her social status bowing before her, like any mortal she would have trembled each time the telephone rang. Sri Lankans are familiar with nuisance calls and the obscene language that goes with them. She had no alternative but to keep the in-coming calls under surveillance. The nuisance calls ceased immediately.

Any reasonable person would have come to the conclusion that the callers were from the high and the mighty of the land who got the information within seconds when the information went to the Superintendent of Telecommunications. Ms. Ranasinghe thought that her woes were over and that she could now proceed with her work without being disturbed by anonymous callers.

Alas! the verbal onslaught ceased and the written onslaught began. The letters purportedly came from a group claiming to be warriors who would kill her if she ever released the suspects on bail. For the first time she had proof in the nature of a document threatening her with death. She filed the documents in the case record and directed the CID to begin an investigation. This is not the first time that Judges were threatened or would be threatened.

During the darkest years of our recent history when there was an insurrection which engulfed the country Judges were constantly under threat. In 1990, one of our most respected Judges of the Supreme Court, A.R.B. Amarasinghe was threatened in a similar manner. He wrote the following words in his judgment where the alleged attacker thought that he could influence the thinking of the Judge with anonymous threats . But this is what Justice Amarasinghe wrote:

"Every private communication to a Judge for the purpose of influencing his decision upon a matter publicly before him is necessarily calculated to divert the course of justice and deserves reproof and censure as a contempt of Court. If we are to do what men and women of goodwill who respect the Rule of Law want us to do the power vested in us to ensure that we their Judges are free from peril and foul horror, real or pretended, expressed or veiled, ought to be effectively exercised."

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