I humbly beg to be permitted to address to your goodself the following appeal, which follows upon the TV interview given by the Secretary, Ministry of Justice, on 15th July, revealing anxieties over the current crime wave and an intention, inter alia, to re-introduce the death penalty as a necessary response.

First of all, permit me to say it is for the undersigned a great privilege to address the highest in the land as one Lawyer to another, and that on a burning topic of the day. (If you please, Sir, upon rough reckoning, I am two decades your senior in age, and a decade your junior in the Law.)

The fact is that the administration of criminal justice has been rapidly deteriorating over the years and at the present time is at the lowest ebb conceivable, judged by the 4% rate of so-called successful prosecutions in our Courts.

This means that at present 96% of the prosecutions in our Courts are failed prosecutions. It is a tragic and scandalous abandonment of accountability to the public on the part of our justice system and all those who man it.

It is a clear and unerring signal something is radically wrong somewhere: it is extremely tragic none in the justice system has taken the trouble over the years to right the grave wrong of such a massive miscarriage of justice.

It is in such a context that I humbly claim to clearly identify the fault, and prescribe the correct remedy, in the submissions below. As such, I humbly urge that they merit urgent consideration at the hands of both yourself and your administration.

I would here like to stress that a Committee on the Judiciary in Parliament of the like of what is supposed to be attached to either the U.S. House of Representatives or its Senate is a desperate necessity if the people are to have some recourse of complaint at least under cover of the supremacy of Parliament, in a state of such desperation where grievances in the justice system remain unredressed on such massive scale.

It signifies a failure in bringing guilt home to the guilty in the first place, even before the question of punishment could be considered.

Even the death penalty alone would be largely negatived if its application could be stultified at the delirious rate of a 96% of failed prosecutions.

Though in that context it is welcome to hear the new Minister of Justice is firming up resolve in favour of this level of punishment, seeing how rampant capital crime has become in this country and that on the flimsiest of provocations. A constant danger to ordinary civil society who have no means of self-defence under legal prohibitions against retention of lethal weapons themselves. So that, in whatever slight a degree it comes into effect, its impact on its own class of crime is bound to be significant.

But in the general mass of other crimes, the impact of punishment will depend on how widely it can be applied. This is virtually wholly negated by the prevailing 96% rate of failed prosecutions, where 96% of criminals escape with impunity.

If the criminal law is to be credible, 96% should signify the rate not of failed prosecutions but of successful prosecutions! When alone punishment could be applied.

Why it is not 96%, but only 4%, is the question. It is examined below.

It must be mentioned to the credit of your immediate predecessor that this country came well within reach of deliverance from the present sad state of affairs when President Kumaratunga, to begin with, in the early years of this decade, appointed the Presidential Commission on Law and Order chaired by Retired S.C. Justice Hon.S.W.B. Wadugodapitiya, to inquire and report on about the same subject of the crime wave, when it was as I recollect she nearly screamed at the then IGP to stop within a nominated number of months the spate of murders then going on. Needless to state, the IGP failed to oblige. And the failure continues.

I had the privilege of giving evidence before that Commission. Sadly, it is to her eternal discredit that when at last the report came, it was shelved. It must be said that the country suffers grievously in consequence, as signified by the return of the crisis which is what is now again troubling the Ministry of Justice, and broadly speaking, is now challenging Your Excellency’s government.

Though your predecessor is no longer in office, her official advisers must share the blame for their share of negligence. Indeed, it would do well to ensure that those of them who still remain in office were removed so as to make a clear way for fresh thinking, the paramount need in this crisis. The fact is, the crisis is one of global disinformation, of ancient error, that calls for one of the greatest legal revolutions in modern times, which Sri Lanka will need to correct in collaboration with the international community. But the first priority is to understand it.

In this way it is earnestly to be hoped Your Excellency will ensure the present regrets will not be repeated.

Apparently, hardly anybody knows about the Wadugodapitiya Commission report. But now that its existence is revealed, even in this humble communication, the first thing to be done is unarguably to have it released and studied at once as a matter of the first priority.

It is hoped Your Excellency will urgently look into the matter personally to have it released for publication, and studied, immediately, for implementation as quickly as possible.

In actual fact, as I mentioned in the course of my evidence before the Commission, I had by then been already launched on a course of study to find out the answer to the riddle of the law responsible for its extreme aberration in failing in such gross degree amidst the prevailing crime wave.

The study was actually in an area outside the law, and at deeper level. In other words, almost by chance, it was in philosophy. Which I continue to pursue with zeal, especially since it has fully answered the inquiry.

The persuasions of philosophy serve to turn the law entirely inside out.

I beg to state that "Logic and the Laws of Thought" borrowed from that learning reveal that our law of crime is fundamentally confused and confounded in embracing one of the greatest follies the world has ever known. It has thrust it virtually to the lunatic fringe.

It is indeed that magnitude of folly that has produced so gross a result as the 96% prosecution failures.

The central folly of the Criminal Law lies in its fond notion of the Presumption of Innocence, though venerated as virtually the highest deity of the legal Pantheon in English law.

As demonstrated below, it is no divine mystery, nor divine truth. It is wholly false - indeed, a piece of stupidity that is entirely as absurd as it sounds.

As such, it condemned my mind to silent conscientious dissent ever since first acquaintance, compelling it to a quest to either reconcile with official teaching, or if, like Socrates, compelled to decide not to believe in the gods the State believed in, to satisfy my own mind and conscience as to the cogent reason why I should so defy the State.

The following arguments from Logic and the Laws of Thought have irresistibly and conclusively compelled the latter alternative.

And it is fallen to my lot to ask of the Head of Sri Lanka’s State, confronted with the present problem, to accept and adopt the vision of truth as I have now to present in the form of the following Arguments from basic philosophy which alone offer the right solution.

The lead thought is that of rationalism which at the beginning of the 17th Century replaced the Dark Ages of Blind Faith with the permanent revolution of Rationalism demanding rational certainty as pre-requisite for truth.

It might be roughly equated to proof beyond all reasonable doubt, with which criminal law is familiar enough and could raise no dispute in the present context.

Unfortunately, criminal law has been caught off its guard in gullibly swallowing the palpably absurd notion of the Presumption of Innocence free of such proof, and implicitly, and in tame concession to English chauvinism under the aegis of which it was born and bred, and eventually spread throughout the world under British imperialism.

The Presumption states in the more complete form given in Article 11 (1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (as opposed to Article 13(5) of our Constitution) thus:

Anyone with a moral sentiment of sense and sensibility making first encounter with this notion must stagger at the horrific sacrilege in the sanctity of innocence with which it invests the "everyone" that in the same breath it traduces with the accusation of a penal offence.

So much so that, anyone whose assent is sought to the proposition in being told of it in the first place, would want to know what God or Demon decreed and conferred to a criminal so specifically identified, such a right, and for what reason.

Actually, in the first place, the specific must override the general - generalia specialibus non derogant. But gullibility in abject deference to authority steamrollers this formidable obstacle.

Anyway, no explanation whatsoever is forthcoming, and the sense of outrage at the incongruity remains unappeased in the act of blind faith in implicitly accepting the Presumption.

In this context, one is reminded then that it is not for nothing that a leading exponent of philosophy of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, has gone so far as to define philosophy simply as an "activity aimed at the logical clarification of thoughts"!

Which suggests the possibility that the inventor of the Presumption might well have desisted in his task if only he reflected for a moment on the stark incongruity as already mentioned of the attribution of innocence to a named and specifically identified criminal!

Thus, the Presumption as a proposition of Truth vanishes the very moment, and ipso facto, certainty for the proposition is sought. One is back to square one.