NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court has directed district courts, prison authorities, and other officials to “strictly comply” with directions on releasing first-time offenders who have served more than one-third of their maximum sentence in jail. The court also “deprecated” the Delhi Police for filing a misleading status report in the case.
Justice Girish Kathpalia noted that several accused persons were languishing in jail even after undergoing incarceration for one-third—or at times even more—of the maximum punishment prescribed for the offences they are accused of, despite clear directions from the Supreme Court. The directions were issued while hearing a bail application moved by Rishabh, accused of cheating a woman and her daughter.
The judge said authorities concerned, including the Delhi High Court Legal Services Committee and the Delhi State Legal Services Authority, “must ensure” strict compliance with the Supreme Court’s directions “in letter and spirit”.
“A copy of this order be sent to all Principal District and Sessions Judges as well as the Director General (Prisons), with directions to ensure strict compliance of the above-mentioned directions of the Supreme Court (in the case of In Re: Inhuman Conditions in 1382 Prisons),” the court said in its April 13 order.
The judge also “deprecated” the Delhi Police after noting that the investigating officer had attempted to mislead the court by wrongly attributing a co-accused’s incriminating audio recordings to the present accused. “At the outset, I must deprecate the conduct of the investigating agency in this case, as a misleading status report was filed,” the judge observed.
The court further expressed surprise over the failure to arrest co-accused Nitin, who allegedly impersonated a CBI official to dupe the victims, noting that the police failed to explain why only Rishabh was arrested among five accused persons. “Of course, it is the prerogative of the investigator to arrest or not to arrest an accused. But in the factual matrix of the present case, such conduct on the part of the investigating agency raises unanswered questions, to say the least,” the court added.
The SC has held that bail should be granted to first-time offenders who have spent one-third of the maximum imprisonment period as undertrials. The judge said, “Admittedly, the accused is a first-time offender and has never been convicted of any offence in the past. The accused has spent more than one-third of the maximum imposable sentence of seven years’ incarceration in jail.”
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