The Tainted Sponge: Deconstructing The "Mechanistic Fallacy" Of Judicial Compartmentalisation In India
- IJLLR Journal
- 48 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Spandhana M, B.A.LLB (Hons.), BITS Law School, Mumbai
ABSTRACT
Although the transition from the Indian Evidence Act to the Bhartiya Sakshya Adhiniyam represents an important moment in Indian criminal justice system’s history, it however, remains anchored to an obsolete "inclusionary rule" that prioritizes the relevancy of evidence over the legality of the procedure of acquisition. This essay argues that the current statute’s failure to adopt the "Fruit of the Poisonous Tree" doctrine is not merely a constitutional oversight, but a fundamental violation of judicial epistemic integrity.
"The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.”
The legal logic of exclusion is often powerless against the experience of a known truth. Drawing upon research in neuro-law as well as cognitive psychology, and by analyzing this in the context of various theories, this work attempts to investigate and dissect the legal fiction of ‘judicial compartmentalization’, the assumption that a trier of fact can consciously disregard ‘poisoned’ evidence once it has been admitted into the record. The law operates on the mechanistic misbelief that the judicial mind can partition or 'delete' inadmissible data, when, on the other hand, cognitive science proves it is actually a sponge that remains permanently "tainted" by every piece of evidence it absorbs. The verdict might look legal on paper, but biologically, it was driven by information that was never supposed to be there. This makes the ‘inclusionary rule’ a psychological impossibility.
This paper attempts to argue that the BSA’s inclusionary framework forces the judicial mind into a state of cognitive dissonance. Hence, it concludes that, for a verdict to be truly impartial, law must protect the sanctity of the neural narrative. It recommends a shift from a rights-based exclusion to an integrity-based exclusionary rule, arguing a verdict derived from a compromised cognitive process is, by definition, a miscarriage of justice.
