NEW DELHI: Supreme Court on Thursday held that a convict should be granted bail if there is no chance of his or her appeal against conviction being heard in near future in high courts because of huge pendency of cases.
A bench of Justices Abhay S Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan frowned on MP HC’s ruling that held that a plea for suspension of sentence could be allowed only when a convict has served half of the sentence awarded by a trial court.
“We are surprised that the HC invented a new proposition of law that has no basis,” SC said while quashing HC’s order and granting bail to the convict who already spent nine months in jail. SC said HC should have applied the law as it exists and the petitioner should not have been forced to move it for relief.
SC also said that his appeal was not likely to be heard soon in HC due to pendency of cases. The bench said that SC in 1999 ruled that suspension of sentence should be allowed in normal cases and only in exceptional cases bail plea should not be allowed.
The apex court has been expressing its anguish over “intellectual dishonesty” by lower courts and high courts by denying bail to the accused in cases involving ordinary infractions despite apex court’s various orders exhorting them to be liberal in granting bail when custody is not needed.
It had said reluctance of courts to grant bail results in everybody approaching the apex court for bail, when 40% of cases which are normal in nature should have been decided in HCs and trial courts. The influx of such cases creates undue burden on SC and creates a huge task for it. It went to the extent of saying that courts denying bail in cases where custody was not needed amounts to “intellectual dishonesty”.
