New Delhi: The Supreme Court on April 27 set aside an order of the Madhya Pradesh high court cancelling the bail of an accused on the ground that a co-accused had secured bail only after a longer period on custody.
A bench of Justices V.Ramasubramanian and Pankaj Mittal said that it had wrongly applied the principle of parity with the co-accused.
In this case (Shahrukh @ Banti vs The State of Madhya Pradesh), the high court cancelled the regular bail granted to the appellant by the Indore Sessions Court in an application registered suo motu by the high court under Section 439(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973.
The appellant was implicated in a criminal complaint registered on January 20, 2020 for alleged offences punishable under the relevant provisions of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, Madhya Pradesh Forest Produce (Regulation of Trade) Act, 1969 and Biological Diversity Act, 2002.
After the appellant’s anticipatory bail application was rejected, he was arrested on June 6, 2022. A supplementary charge sheet was filed against him on August 3, 2022.
The Session Court granted regular bail to the appellant on September 5, 2022, considering that he has already spent three months in custody and that the charge sheet has already been filed. The Sessions Court also took note of the fact that the co-accused in the case has been released on bail.
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After about a month of the release of the appellant on regular bail by the Sessions Court, the high court passed an order on October 18, 2022, directing the registration of a suo motu application for cancellation of bail on the ground that the co-accused were released on bail after completion of one year in custody and that, therefore, the release of the appellant just after completion of three months was not proper.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court noted that the Sessions Court cited four reasons for granting bail to the appellant. They are:
(1) that the appellant has already spent three months in custody;
(2) that charges have been framed and trial has begun;
(3) that there was no seizure from the applicant; and
(4) that the co-accused have been released on bail.
The Supreme Court held that instead of appreciating that the bail granted by the Sessions Court was on four grounds, the high court focused on a hyper-technicality to find out how much time the co-accused spent in custody before being released.
Reasoning
The Supreme Court reasoned that parity could not be understood in a hyper-technical way to mean the number of years, months, days and hours that the co-accused spent, to decide whether another accused should be granted bail or not.
Once the charge sheet is filed and the co-accused released on bail, the only question that falls for consideration is as to whether the continued detention of one accused was necessary despite the release of the co-accused, the bench held.
The bench directed the release of the appellant, if he has been taken into custody, pursuant to the impugned order of the high court. However, it directed the appellant to cooperate in the trial.