Framing criminals, famed trials and media frames in the course of justice

Justice? You get justice in the next world. In this world, you have the law,” wrote William Gaddis. Justice has fled the world, replaced by its this-worldly counterparts like judges, lawyers and the media.

The Aarushi-Hemraj double homicide judgment on November 25, from the special CBI court located in a small court campus in Ghaziabad, convicted Rajesh and Nupur Talwar for killing their 14-year-old daughter Aarushi and their servant Hemraj. The couple have been convicted under the Indian Penal Code, section 302, 201 and 34. The Special Judge Shyam Lal on November 26, awarded life imprisonment to the couple for the crimes committed.

The media, in paradoxical ways, sways between being a mechanism of social change on the one hand, and a problem-generating machine on the other. Often it is even circular, where the problem and the solutions are both generated within the same mechanism. The Aarushi-Hemraj murder trial depicted this ecology of communication that is emerging in the Indian media.

 To make sense of the incidents surrounding the case, it is imperative to analyze the frames and formats and the structures within which a story is narrated. Like the meaning of a sentence requires a play of semantics as well as syntax and grammar, the meanings of a story require not simply some events in isolation, but the events ordered within a structure, a narrative, a frame.

After the judgment, the Talwars in a statement said they were “deeply disappointed” but would “refuse to feel defeated and will continue to fight for justice”. But the trial was only partly about justice. It was more about different narratives and stories, told by the State and the courts on one hand and the media on the other, sometimes contradictory and sometimes jointly conflagrated.

Over five years, the police, the CBI, the multiple media groups all narrated several stories within various frames. The Talwars were framed as child murderers well before the judgment. Reports circulated about how they were wife swappers and Rajesh Talwar having other affairs. They apparently were “too composed” during investigation, they didn’t cry enough. They had purportedly found young Aarushi in a compromising position with 45-year-old Hemraj. And then there are other images too, those of a middle-class family, dentist parents and a 14-year-old daughter Aarushi studying in the 9th standard. Images of a close-knit happy family juxtaposed with images of cold-blooded murder, the bludgeoned head and the throat slit with surgical precision. 

The judiciary, the CBI and the Uttar Pradesh police are equally involved as co-producers in scripting the multiple versions. But in this case, the frames of their storytelling are different from those of the media. The police and the judiciary have a different internal logic and coherence, guided by laws of evidence, strategies of prosecution and witness cross-examinations. It is about staging a different play in the court halls of law. Soon after discovering Hemraj’s body, the UP police called a press conference to narrate their conjectures, which, muddled with journalistic passions, fed into the creation of sensations and epics.

The UP police were later replaced by the CBI which had theories of its own. The CBI in its closure report cited “critical and substantial gaps” in the evidence, an absence of any clear cut motive and an incomplete understanding of the sequence of events. Yet the District Magistrate saw it fit to order trial of the Talwars as the main accused, based on the same closure report. Now, it was left to the prosecution to find creative ways of joining the dots and give meaning to the scattered facts.  

Media frames as well as judicial trials require a narrative structure. They are meant to tell a story. Telling a story, however, needs a coherence that scattered evidences can never seem to supply.
Stories need to have a beginning, middle and an end. Unconnected and scattered pieces of evidence are found, and need to be reconfigured into flesh and blood. They are packaged with actual people and emotions, making it look “realistic”. The “realistic” then takes a life of its own, alienated from the actual lives of the Talwars, which is rendered irrelevant.

In the language of law, unrestricted and unregulated freedom in publishing information about a criminal case under trial prejudices the mind of those who are adjudicating the matter and those investigating it. Such practices are considered as undue interference with the administration of justice. The Law Commission of India’s 200th report, which is on media trials and the fair administration of justice, speaks about the balance of freedom of speech and expression of the media on one hand, and due process of rights of the suspect and accused on the other. Talking about parallel trials in the media as an extreme form of trial, it states “since the newspaper usurps the function of the Court without the safeguards of procedure, right to cross-examine etc, such publications prejudge the facts and influence the Court, witnesses and others.”

There is some merit in the above argument about the relation between fair trial and media rights. But within the present context, the following comments arise. Firstly, such an insulation of the judiciary from the media is no longer possible in our global urban environments. It is also useful to look beyond the deceptive appearance of autonomy that legitimizes the judiciary. Secondly, as Pierre Boudieu the sociologist and philosopher says, the juridical field is in intense resistance to the influence of competing forms of social practice, it is a site of struggle in competition for control and power.

The control, inter alia, is over truth. Whether the truth about the Aarush-Hemraj trial was as stated by the CBI, the judiciary or the other versions of truth suggested by the media? The ultimate truth, of course, is revealed by the judiciary as an institution. But the site of struggle continues to be about who claims legitimacy over this alleged truth. Thirdly, truth here has to be read in terms of coherence in narrations and stories, not so much as satya but as kavya. The Aarushi-Hemraj trial is not about justice or the truth, but about narratives and control over it.

The author is a Research Associate at Centre for Law and Policy Research, Bangalore