New Delhi: The Supreme Court Wednesday deprecated the “growing practice” of routinely challenging bail orders, as it refused to cancel bail granted to former Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel’s son Chaitanya Baghel in the Rs 2,000 crore liquor scam case.
A three-judges bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant dismissed the Chhattisgarh government’s appeal against the high court’s January order granting bail to Chaitanya. It also expunged certain adverse comments by the Chhattisgarh High Court against the Economic Offence Wing (EOW).
“The remarks have been very uncalled for,” opined the CJI, agreeing with Senior Advocate Mahesh Jethmalani, who appeared for the state. “The remarks made by the High Court which tend to cast aspersion on the prosecution are completely uncalled for and are hereby expunged. All issues are kept open,” ordered the bench.
Overall, the hearing focused on what it said has become “significant expansion of bail jurisprudence”. With the appeals against grant of bail increasing, the bench said, courts are being forced to examine if a legally flawed bail order, by itself, is enough to justify cancellation of an accused’s liberty.
This pattern, the bench said, has developed a judicial review doctrine to test liberty.
Justice Joymalya Bagchi, one of the bench members, remarked that the test for cancelling bail is whether continued liberty obstructs the administration of justice, not merely whether the bail order is legally incorrect.
He urged Jethmalani to deliberate on the legal question of whether correctness of an order be the sole test to deprive liberty of an accused.
The judge was of the view that the top court should intervene to cancel bail only when the accused’s release or personal liberty is so egregious that the functioning of the administration of justice becomes impossible.
“We have held that reasons be given in an order. But a High Court judge says, ‘I grant bail’. Can we just set it aside merely because there are no reasons? Such wrong orders are there left, right and centre,” he also remarked.
The bench also observed that appeals against bail orders have increased sharply. The prosecution’s focus is more on correcting orders and not on the larger goal of completing the trial and achieving the larger goal of criminal justice.
“If the prosecutor or investigator is so focused on all this, then the ultimate goal of securing a conviction gets compromised. This is why our jurisprudence in bringing about correctness in granting bail is delaying the further cause of trial. The number of SLPs has increased so much because of this in the last year…This is our concern about the administration of criminal justice and not on individuals at all,” said Justice Bagchi.
He even noted that lengthy bail orders in UAPA and PMLA cases had become a norm. These orders run into 40-50 pages, stressing that judicial time must be apportioned in a cautious manner.
CJI Surya Kant too took a grim view of high courts’ increasingly rigid approach while dealing with bail matters, citing a recent Allahabad High Court case where an advocate remained in jail for two years before he was released on bail.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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