‘Laws should be flexible enough to take account of various circumstances, times and places.’

The legislature of a country always aims at designing a statute which is vast in its ambit, and thereby including various circumstances, times and places. But any such law may not be regarded as a flexible one. It has been widely noticed that many people inadvertently fall victim to such strict laws, and the punishment for a transgression is in most cases harsher than is required. It is the need of the hour that the laws that are executed by the legislature be of a more flexible nature.

When I talk about making laws flexible, I do not mean to make them lenient so that people do not scruple even once to infringe, but to make a system that is a good measure of the severity of a crime. A law should be pliant enough that a belligerent criminal doesn’t escape its brunt and a less severe criminal does not fall victim to unwarranted punishment. The main purpose behind designing any law is to help people to attain justice. The people of a country must respect and obey all its laws and in all cases eschew infringing them. But if innocent criminals continue to be punished beyond what is ethically and legally required, then the legislature faces an acute danger of its own people turning against the law.

Also the laws may have a scale to make the reparation process more efficient. The crime may be located on the designed scale and based on the severity observed, punishments of different degrees of severity may be credited to the criminals. For example if one person commits a murder in a fully conscious state and the other does so under the strong influence of alcohol and another person who committed a similar crime is a minor, then the three deserve varying degree of sentences located on the scale under the same department i.e. ‘murder’.

Also unnecessary addition to the criminal lists hinders the process of justice. The court witnesses a deluge of pending cases, and more cases continue to proliferate. Due to such lengthy lists, the cases which are more important and critical and require speedy justice, often are affected by the dilatory effects of the judicial proceedings. It is of utmost importance that less severe cases should not be fashioned as critical ones and hence avoid the unnecessary delays caused in the courts.

I conclude by saying that flexible laws do much better to a country than the strict ones. A country enforcing supple laws strengthens its integrity, democracy and respect towards the laws. And also justice comes easy.