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HOW LAW REPORTERS COVER COURT NEWS… No news is good news!By Dr Olav Albuquerque
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HOW LAW REPORTERS COVER COURT NEWS… No news is good news!By Dr Olav Albuquerque

Aug 28- Sept 04, 2026, LAW August 28, 2026 , by

COVERING the courts is a difficult task because reporters have to remain present in the courtroom, know the law, take down the arguments, and reproduce the order passed without distortion. When I was the senior legal correspondent of a national daily, I had many adverse experiences where the presiding officer of a tribunal would direct me not to take down notes. This is preposterous because the right to practice any profession in Article 19 (1) (g) includes the right to take notes in open court.
 Be that as it may, the local English dailies have ignored an interesting case in Mumbai where a judge of the city civil and sessions court has been suspended for demanding a bribe through his clerk. Judges are immune from prosecution under the Judges Protection Act, 1985. Between 2016 and 2025, 8,600 complaints of judicial misconduct or corruption were made to the 25 chief justices heading high courts in India.
Most of these bribes have gone unreported because, with exceptions, most law reporters are incompetent and a few of their editors are equally so. In the high court at Porvorim, we rarely see reporters who merely transcribe judgments from the high court website.
The Mumbai judge’s clerk was named in an FIR lodged by the ACB in Mumbai, and the agency sent its request for sanction to the law and judiciary department, while permission from the new chief justice of the Bombay High Court has been sought to initiate a probe against the suspended judge. “The Indian Express” was the only newspaper to front page this news item.
HIGH court and Supreme Court judges are totally immune from disciplinary action, while they too cannot protest when they are transferred because their orders inconvenience the government. Two examples are Justice Akhil Qureshi, who was shunted from the Gujarat high court to the Bombay high court and then as chief justice of the tiny Tripura and Rajasthan high courts, because the Union government allegedly opposed his transfer to the large and prestigious Madhya Pradesh High Court as its chief justice.

ROT PENETRATS SUBORDINATE JUDICIARY
WHILE constitutional judges enjoy systemic protection, the institutional decay within the subordinate judiciary is staggering. Trial courts are the primary face of justice for the ordinary citizen. Yet, they are frequently plagued by administrative apathy, procedural incompetence, and outright corruption. The central problem is that lower court judges are in a mad rush to satisfy disposal quotas to secure promotions, completely sacrificing the quality of appreciation of evidence.
 A shocking testament to clerical and judicial incompetence came to light when the high court of Bombay at Goa was forced to order a fresh hearing in an appeal after discovering a bizarre anomaly. A disposal order from a lower court was found to be entirely incomplete; it was partly dictated and partly handwritten by the then presiding officer, but it was never finalized, signed, or uploaded to the e-Courts portal. Such structural carelessness forces litigants into expensive re-hearings, revealing a systemic failure where basic judicial duties are neglected.

GOAN ANGLE, COMPROMISED INSTITUTIONS & POLITICAL MEDDLIN
GOA’S judicial and anti-corruption machinery has not been immune to this downward spiral. When judicial officers or anti-graft watchdogs show teeth, political overloads quickly de-fang them. A striking historical example involves Judge PV Savaikar, a senior anti-corruption judge whose powers to hear graft cases were allegedly abruptly divested by the state government, shortly after he made highly critical observations against the police in a sensitive matter. This controversial re-allocation of powers acts as a warning to other judicial officers who dare to remain fiercely independent.
 Furthermore, look at the state of the Goa Lokayukta — the apex anti-corruption body designed to keep public servants in check. Following the exit of Justice (retd) PK Misra, who openly lamented the toothless nature of the office, the institution has routinely collapsed into functional paralysis. Political factions deliberately delay appointments or appoint hand-tied figures to render the body a “white elephant” that burns crores of taxpayers’ money while cases pile up into oblivion.
Even within lower court operations, scandalous interactions with the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) have surfaced. Years ago, Senior Civil Judge and Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SJM) SJM Sangodkar found his office embroiled in a massive bribery scandal when his peon, Aroskar, was caught by the ACB carrying an active court file directly to the judge’s private residence. Though the judge vociferously defended his integrity and blamed administrative lapses, the incident exposed how easily lower court staff can manipulate files and bridge corrupt linkages between litigants and the chamber.

BREAKING THE SILENCE
THE absolute opacity of the judiciary protects incompetent and compromised judges from public scrutiny. When the press remains silent, and law reporters fail to decode the systemic rot, the common citizen is left entirely defenceless. If the rule of law is to survive in Goa and the rest of India, the fortress of judicial immunity must be breached by uncompromising journalistic exposure and rigorous institutional accountability.

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