New Delhi: It was just another Tuesday morning at the Dwarka district court, when judicial magistrate first class Saurabh Goyal called out a seven-year case in which four men were accused of trespassing a parcel of village land in Palam.
An angry magistrate noted that the accused had not submitted bail bonds or surety, despite being told to do so on at least three previous occasions. Over an hour later, Goyal called out the matter again and made it clear that the accused persons had to furnish bail bonds.
However, on seeing that they had failed to do so, despite repeated insistence, and a previous order directing them, the court ruled last week that the accused would be held guilty of contempt of court.
The men, it said, would be convicted under Section 228 of the erstwhile Indian Penal Code (IPC), which deals with the offense of intentionally insulting or interrupting a public servant while in a judicial proceeding.
“Despite waiting and calling the matter twice from 10:00 am till 11:40 am, the bail bonds were not furnished. For wasting the time of the court, which is in contempt of the order duly promulgated on the last date of hearing, the accused are hereby held guilty for contempt of court proceedings and are convicted for offence U/s 228 IPC. They are directed to stand in the court till the rising of this court with their hands straight in the air,” the magistrate ruled.
Essentially, a bail bond is an agreement to pay the court if a criminal defendant fails to meet the terms of conditional release from custody. Simply put, it acts as a form of security in making sure that the defendant fulfills their legal obligations or conditions for release, which are the courts impose.
“From the last three dates, the judge had been directing them to furnish bail bonds and surety, but they kept seeking more time. However, they only furnished it this Tuesday, after the court warned them they would be convicted for contempt,” Delhi-based lawyer Sandeep Shokeen, who represented the complainant Harkesh Jain, told ThePrint.
“After the 11 am order, three out of four litigants showed up with bail bonds, but there was one, Kuldeep, who failed to do so. This is when the court said it could impose a much more stringent punishment and sentence him custody. Subsequently, Kuldeep’s lawyer agreed to furnish the bail bond and surety at 1pm,” Shokeen said.
The matter was resolved by lunchtime, when Kuldeep’s lawyer appeared before the court, along with his bail bonds and surety. Shortly after, the court released him on bail.
Significantly, this is not the first time that a court has imposed such an unusual, out-of-the-box punishment on litigants.
Punishments in criminal cases
In Chapter III of the erstwhile IPC, punishments in criminal cases are categorised into five types: capital punishment, life imprisonment, simple or rigorous imprisonment, forfeiture of property, and fines.
Apart from this, solitary confinement is also a form of punishment under Section 73 of the IPC. The newly-enacted Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), which replaces the IPC, also contains “community service” as a form of punishment, for lighter offences like defamation.
In its 47th Report, the Law Commission of India, had said that several considerations factor in when courts have to decide how a sentence should be given. These include the nature of offence, prior criminal record of the offender, age, professional or social background, and the possibility of rehabilitation or reform.
Punishments are usually a matter of the judge’s discretion, but they must also be proportional to the offence committed. In the United States, the Eighth Amendment requires courts to consider whether a punishment is proportionate to the crime. Similarly, Section 12 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms says everyone has the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.
Even Indian courts have from time to time imposed unique, unusual and unconventional forms of punishments on litigants. From directing people to plant trees to being made to sit in a corner–courts do not shy away from taking the creative approach when it comes to awarding punishments.
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Planting trees
In 2019, the Supreme Court directed a 32-year-old doctor in Murshidabad, West Bengal, to plant 100 trees in a year, for a crime he committed several years ago.
Although he was handed a three-year sentence for attempted murder, the court noted that the offence was committed in 2004, when he was a minor, and modified this to community service instead.
Similarly, the Madhya Pradesh High Court, in June, directed a police inspector to plant 1,000 fruit trees for his failure to pass on its notice to a minor survivor of a sexual crime, in time.
Closer home, Justice Najmi Waziri, a former judge of the Delhi HC, did his bit in helping sustain the green cover of the city.
The retired judge had contributed to planting over 1 lakh trees in Delhi between 2018 and 2023. For instance, in 2023, he directed officials of the Public Works Department (PWD) to plant saplings for failure to comply with the court’s and the National Green Tribunal’s previous orders.
Sit in a corner
In 2019, a bench of then CJI Ranjan Gogoi and Justice L. Nageswara Rao, directed former interim CBI chief M.Nageswara Rao, along with his additional legal advisor Bhasuran S. to be sentenced to confinement in a corner of the court, till it rises.
The punishment came after the Supreme Court found that the former officers had acted in contempt of an earlier order, and that the then CBI joint director shifted out of the federal agency. In its earlier order, the top court had made clear that the joint director must be detained as in-charge of the probe, in the Muzzaffarpur shelter home rape case.
Cleaning police stations
About 24 people were directed by the Delhi HC in September, 2023 to carry out basic cleaning work at four police stations for three days as a condition to quash criminal cases against them. Such cleaning had to be done to the satisfaction of the investigating officer, the court said.
Following a settlement between the parties, they had approached the court for setting aside the criminal case against them, which related to offences like rioting, voluntarily causing hurt, and culpable homicide.
Teach extra classes
In August, 2022, the Delhi HC set aside an FIR registered against a government school teacher in 2014, for accidentally carrying a live bullet in his bag. As punishment, the teacher had to take extra classes for two hours daily for a month for the academically weak students in the school.
Pro-bono cases
Nine lawyers were directed by the same high court in June 2010 to take up at least 24 cases in a year, without taking any money from clients. This was after the lawyers were held guilty of contempt for manhandling a judge of the Rohini district court.
A special three-judge bench came up with this punishment for the nine lawyers, and directed them to deposit Rs 50,000 to the Rohini Bar Library fund.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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