Consider the following statements :
(a) No person shall be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once, including any departmental proceedings.
(b) The protection against self-incrimin

Question

Consider the following statements :
(a) No person shall be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once, including any departmental proceedings.
(b) The protection against self-incrimination extends to both oral evidence and documentary evidence.
(c) The protection against self-incrimination extends to both criminal and civil proceedings.

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Correct — option (2), statement (b) alone. The list here has three statements, (a) to (c), not four, and all three are drawn from Article 20 of the Constitution, which reads in its three clauses: no person shall be convicted of any offence except for violation of a law in force at the time of the commission of the act charged as an offence, nor be subjected to a penalty greater than that which might have been inflicted under the law in force at the time of the commission of the offence; no person shall be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once; and no person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself. Statement (b) is correct. The protection against self-incrimination in Article 20(3) is a protection against being compelled to be a witness, and testimony is not confined to the spoken word — it covers what a person says on oath and equally what a person is compelled to produce in the form of a personal record or statement, so both oral evidence and documentary evidence fall inside the guarantee. The settled position also marks out what falls outside it, and the boundary is the one worth learning: the clause does not protect against the compulsory production of material objects, against being required to give a thumb impression, a specimen signature, a specimen of handwriting or a sample of blood, or against the compulsory exhibition of the body. The distinction underlying the line is between compelling a person to furnish testimony out of his own knowledge, which is barred, and obtaining physical evidence from his person, which is not. Statement (a) is not correct, and the words that break it are the last three. Article 20(2) protects against being prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once, but the protection operates only in proceedings before a court of law or a judicial tribunal. A departmental or administrative proceeding is not of that character; it is a disciplinary inquiry by an employer into the conduct of a servant, not a prosecution for an offence. A public servant convicted and punished by a criminal court may therefore still face departmental action arising out of the same facts, and the rider added to statement (a) asserts the opposite. Statement (c) is not correct either. The guarantee in Article 20(3) opens with the words no person accused of any offence, which confine it to criminal proceedings; it does not extend to civil proceedings or to proceedings that are not criminal in nature. Since statement (b) alone is correct, and neither statement (a) nor statement (c) survives, the answer is option (2). Notice how the question is engineered: each false statement is a true proposition with a false extension bolted on to the end of it, so a candidate who reads only as far as the familiar part will accept both.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option asserts that statement (a) is correct, and it is not. The first half of the statement reproduces Article 20(2) faithfully — no person shall be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once — and it is the tail, including any departmental proceedings, that makes it false. The protection against double jeopardy is available only where there has been a prosecution before a court of law or a judicial tribunal; a departmental inquiry conducted by an administrative authority is not a prosecution and does not attract the clause, so a person may be tried by a criminal court and separately proceeded against by his department on the same facts. There is a second narrowing worth knowing, because it is asked in its own right: the Indian clause protects only where the person has been both prosecuted and punished, a formulation the Constituent Assembly settled on deliberately when it revised the draft, and it is therefore narrower than the English rules of autrefois acquit and autrefois convict, which bar a second trial after an acquittal as well. An option that endorses a statement carrying an added rider should always prompt a check of the rider before the familiar opening.  (c) This option requires statements (a) and (b) both to be correct. Statement (b) is, but statement (a) is not, for the reason set out above: Article 20(2) does not reach departmental proceedings, and the words including any departmental proceedings falsify a statement that would otherwise have been a fair paraphrase of the clause. The option is the most attractive of the three wrong ones precisely because it contains the true statement, and it illustrates the standard defence against this format — having identified the statement you are sure of, do not go looking for an option that contains it, because several will; go looking for the statement you are sure is false and eliminate every option that contains that instead. Here, once statement (a) is seen to fail, options (1), (3) and (4) all fall together, since each of them asserts that statement (a) is correct, and only option (2) is left standing. Working by elimination on the false statement is faster and safer than working by confirmation on the true one.  (d) This option requires statements (a) and (c) both to be correct, and neither is. Statement (a) fails on the departmental proceedings rider. Statement (c) fails on a plainer point: the protection against self-incrimination is given by Article 20(3) to a person accused of any offence, so it belongs to criminal proceedings and does not extend to civil ones. The reason for the limit is structural. Article 20 as a whole is headed protection in respect of conviction for offences, and all three of its clauses — no retrospective criminal law, no double jeopardy, no compelled self-incrimination — are protections of a person facing the criminal power of the state. A party to a civil suit is in a different position: he faces another private party, not the state's power to punish, and the rules of civil procedure require parties to disclose documents and to answer interrogatories. Notice also that this option leaves out statement (b), the one statement in the list that is correct, so it is wrong on all three counts.

Concept: Article 20 of the Constitution gathers three distinct protections for a person facing the criminal power of the state, and its heading, protection in respect of conviction for offences, is the key to all three. Clause (1) bars ex post facto criminal law: a person may be convicted only for the violation of a law in force when the act was done, and may not be subjected to a penalty greater than the one that could have been imposed under the law as it then stood. The bar applies to criminal law only, not to civil or tax legislation, and it prevents a heavier penalty being applied retrospectively while permitting a lighter one. Clause (2) is the rule against double jeopardy: no person shall be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once. Two limits define its reach. It operates only in proceedings before a court of law or a judicial tribunal, so a departmental or administrative inquiry does not attract it and may follow a criminal trial on the same facts; and it requires both prosecution and punishment, so it is narrower than the common law rules of autrefois acquit and autrefois convict, which bar a fresh trial after an acquittal as well. Clause (3) protects against self-incrimination: no person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself. It is available only to a person accused of an offence, only in criminal proceedings, and only against compulsion. Within those limits it extends to both oral and documentary evidence, but it has never been read to cover the compulsory production of material objects, the taking of a thumb impression, a specimen signature or handwriting, a sample of blood, or the exhibition of the body — the line being drawn between compelling testimony from a person's own knowledge and obtaining physical evidence from his person. Article 20 is one of the two articles, with Article 21, whose enforcement cannot be suspended even during a Proclamation of Emergency, a protection added by the Forty-fourth Amendment of 1978.

State PCS 2022 Q65 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q65 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer