Prerna Gala
Published on: September 16, 2022 at 20:36 IST
On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners who have served at least ten years of their sentence and whose appeals are not expected to be considered anytime soon should be released on bond, if there are no other extenuating circumstances.
Three petitions were being heard by a bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and MM Sundresh: two concerned individual petitioners’ requests for bail (arising from the Allahabad High Court), and one was a suo motu public interest litigation (PIL) that the supreme court brought in order to develop a strategy for granting bail in situations where appeals of trial court convictions have been pending for a considerable amount of time.
“We can appreciate if any of the parties is delaying the bail itself but short of that, we are of the view, that all persons who have completed 10 years of sentence and appeal is not in near proximity of hearing, with no extenuating circumstances, should be enlarged on bail,” the bench said.
The highest court decided that the instructions given today would apply to all High Courts, inferring that each of them must carry out the same tasks.
Amicus Curiae Gaurav Agarwal informed the bench during the hearing on Thursday that six High Courts had submitted affidavits detailing the exercise being conducted to identify life inmates.
The bench then emphasised that the exercise’s goal was to find cases that were appropriate for the granting of bail or remission for persons who had served a lengthy prison sentence.
In prior decisions concerning the same case, the Supreme Court set down guidelines for disposing of all bail and appeal arguments involving a single offence in one sitting and for extending the accused’s bail unless there are exceptional reasons not to.
Similar directives about the possibility of commuted sentences for inmates serving terms of more than 14 years were also enacted, and it was made plain that vacation benches may handle such cases.
One of the appellants in the current case sought the highest court earlier this year because the High Court continued to consider his criminal appeal from 2012 even though his bail application was denied in 2019.
The High Court’s actions in the appeal angered the Bench, which declared in a March judgement that it was “of the view that the bail should have been for the asking and the impugned order is totally unsustainable.”
The appellant’s attorney informed the top court during that hearing that there are other instances of people who have been imprisoned for more than 16 years who are waiting for the High Court’s Lucknow bench to consider granting them bail.
The top court noted that there had been no bench to hear criminal cases for the previous 25 days in response.
“This is a disturbing state of affairs, more so as we have been seized with the issue of the pendency of bail matters before the High Court of Allahabad and the Lucknow Bench and had even issued directions in this behalf for expediting the same in Saudan Singh vs. State of Uttar Pradesh (Crl. Appeal No.308/ 2022) dated 25th February, 2022.”
As a result, the Lucknow Bench Registrar had been instructed to provide a report on the matter as well as the number of cases involving pending bail applications where the length of confinement exceeded ten years.
While noting that criminal benches were in session at the time, the aforementioned research found that in 1561 cases, the accused had been imprisoned for more than 10 years without having their appeals or bail requests reviewed.