So I have often been asked; and I don't wonder. I often felt that way myself.
When a man first falls into an offence his immediate instinct is to confess to somebody. That is true of all the world. In Burma at the beginning he used to confess to the Court. He was sorry for his offence, he wanted to make the best of it, wanted help to reform. He wanted understanding. He thought the Court wanted to know the truth and he would do all he could to help. But he very soon found the uselessness of this. He got no understanding, no sympathy, only conviction and a vindictive punishment. Naturally he reflected, and pleaders and people who knew the Courts helped him to reflect.
"Fight it out. At worst you can but lose and be no worse off than if you confessed. Why tell the truth? No one expects you to. If you have confessed withdraw your confession. Say you were tortured. A trial is a fight, with the judge as umpire. Do your best. Remember that, even if your offence be a very small one, if it is a cognisable offence you will be ruined for life if convicted." That is the advice he gets. Who will doubt but that, our Courts being what they are, it is sound as a rule? So, because it is a fight he won't confess; he plays for the big stake—acquittal; and sometimes this acts disastrously too. I will tell a case in point—one I tried myself.
A man was accused of maiming a bullock. It had trespassed into his Indian-corn field, and had been found there afterwards hamstrung, and had to be destroyed. It was proved that accused was in the field when the bullock wandered in. It was also proved that accused's chopper was found close to the maimed bullock, covered with blood. Accused had run away and had only been arrested some days later.
Now the malicious maiming of a valuable bullock is a serious offence. Its seriousness partly depends on the value of the animal. The case was quite clearly proved though no one actually saw the offence committed. The defence of the accused was a futile alibi. He had a pleader who arranged this. The evidence for the prosecution seemed quite clear, and I did not see how I could avoid convicting the man of the grave offence. Yet somehow I was not quite happy in my mind. I believed the prosecution was substantially true, but that they had been piling it on a good deal. So before adjourning the case till next day to give me time to write the judgment, I said to the accused:
"I don't believe your alibi. You can see for yourself it has no sense. But maybe if you told me your side of the story it might not look so bad for you as it does now."
He looked at me, hesitated, looked at his pleader, then all of a sudden he did bring the whole story out.
And as he told it, though it did not in any way invalidate the evidence for the prosecution, it did put the matter in quite a new light.
In the first place, the cattle, of which the bullock was one, had been wilfully driven into his field to annoy him and cause him loss. In the second place, he had not deliberately cut the bullock; when he saw the cattle coming through the six-foot-high corn towards him he had in a passion thrown his chopper at the dimly seen moving mass of cattle. Then he had dodged out of their way. When he found afterwards what damage he had done he ran away in a fright.
I found there was evidence to support what he said—for instance, he had gone straight home and told his father before he ran away—so he got off with a small fine. He might have got two years. But unless he had confessed I could never have guessed that there was quite another version of the facts.