3 years RI is good for drink driving.
Death Sentence for killing is more appropriate.

Bombay govt should create atleast a few token shelters for the poor.

Do we have a law(in the books) which says that?

Laws must be objective. You can’t say what you committed on Day X is a crime today, when on Day X the law books said it wasn’t a crime!

And the number of years you have specified is YOUR view of fairness – that is exactly the problem! I’d rather trust an iron law than someone’s subjective judgment!

Finally,
“He is wealthy and the family will be able to pay that off immediately”

Why should the financial status then criminal have any bearing on the punishment?

I think the Alistair kind of crime deserves the death sentence. When an act of deliberate negligence has a high probability of multiple deaths, it should be punishable by death.

And like you, I’m very disturbed by the fact that rich people in India can seemingly do irresponsible, even criminal things, and get away with them.

But if justice is fairplay then the punishment must also be fair to the perpetrator. If it must deter others from driving drunk, it must also ensure — in some way, however flawed — that the perpetrator gets a chance to change, by parole or any other way. 20 years per person may be a little emotional but perhaps 20 years, with a possibility of parole, will do. I don’t really know.

Finally, I’m not sure if Rawls meant his conception of justice as fairness to apply to crime-punishment scenarios; his concern seems to be more about social practices especially as embedded in socio-politcal institutions, especially the distribution of economic opportunities. But I may be wrong.

Atanu on the lack of fairness. I agree with the conception of justice as fairness, as outl [...]

Secondly, even were the police case as strong as possible, this is not murder. At the very best (or worst) you could call drunk driving and killing someone involuntary culpable homicide. And that would be stretching it since there was no intent whatsoever on the part of the accused to harm the victims.

As for Rawls – justice as fairness is easily defined in specific contexts and this is not one of them. If I were driving drunk, and happened to swerve and smash into the pavement, but achieved nothing other than hurting myself and ruining my car, would you accuse me of murder? If not why not – the presence or absence of pavement dwellers is wholly outside my control and in both cases my crime and my intent are the same. Since clearly I would get into very little trouble and Alistair is in big trouble, how easily do you determine ‘fairness’.

I am not trying to underplay the rottenness of the whole affair – whether the crime in the first place, or the probable attempts to subvert the course of law after. But justice systems are not meant to be emotional and provide a cathartic flush of happiness to an onlooker filled with righteous anger. As far as possible they have to follow a system – and that would imply this is not murder, it may be involuntary homicide (which carries a sentence you may still find inadequate), and overall certainly does not justify drawing fairness conclusions – whatever that might mean.

I am one of those who strongly believes that the government is basically incompetent to begin with. Government = Incompetent in my dictionary. That’s why we as a society get so excited when the incompetent government tries to do something that’s out of its comfort zone. So the government is not going to do anything about this. And neither should we want it to do anything.

I think your observation on the lack of sense of fairness is completely on track. While crime and accidents are big items, it’s also reflected in mundane day-to-day habits and activities. I know many people who would think nothing of getting their electricity metering or their phone metering doctored (by paying a small bribe to the meter guy) so that they can pay less for their A/C’s and international phone calls. Or consistently park your car in the wrong spot and eventually “steal” it from your neighbor who gives up in disgust. Such things abound in India. When highly educated upper middle class do this without hesitation, what can you expect from society?

One possible reason for this inherent lack of fairness which comes to my mind (possibly the root cause) is the scarcity mentality we all grow up with. All resources are, by wide experience, scarce. So any means seem justified in capturing them. And the classic game theory implication is that if I don’t use it (or do it), someone else will. So might as well do it ….

- C

But do you see a solution in the short-term considering how much corruption has seeped into almost all nooks and crannies of the society and the law & order mechanism. Is there any hope to expect otherwise?

Mr. Khan should undoubtedly have been given a harsher punishment in my opinion, but to do so just because he was a public personality would have not been fair either.

Who gave the government the right to free ride on somebody’s popularity to create (absolutely well-intentioned) deterrence?