Real judgements, distilled
Court judgements broken down into the case type, how the decision played out, and the lesson worth remembering, with the full judgement available as a PDF.
Criminal Appeal · 2026 INSC 1073
In circumstantial-evidence cases, forensic and DNA evidence must actually corroborate the alleged crime: a conviction cannot survive where the most crucial scientific evidence, on its own terms, points away from rather than toward the prosecution's theory.
Criminal Appeal · 2026 INSC 1074
A conviction based purely on circumstantial evidence requires every link in the chain, timeline, witness credibility, forensic matches, and motive, to be proven beyond reasonable doubt; gaps or suppressed evidence at any link entitle the accused to the benefit of the doubt, even in a serious case like a double murder.
Criminal Miscellaneous Case · 2026:DHC:8505
Courts will not quash a criminal case merely because the accused has a plausible alibi-type defence; unless that defence is conclusive and undisputed, the matter must be tested through the ordinary trial process.
Criminal Miscellaneous Case · 2026:DHC:8547
A private compromise between victim and accused cannot by itself secure quashing of a case involving serious, heinous allegations like attempted murder with a weapon: such matters must proceed to trial regardless of settlement.
First Appeal from Order · 2026:DHC:8563
Railway Claims Tribunals cannot reject a bona fide passenger's death claim based on speculative inferences when there is no direct evidence of an alternative cause of death; the compensation scheme under the Railways Act is to be interpreted generously in favour of victims' families.
Criminal Miscellaneous Case · 2026:DHC:8559
In matrimonial offences, courts can and do quash criminal proceedings once a genuine compromise is verified directly with the complainant, sparing both parties a prolonged and pointless trial.
Bail Application · 2026:DHC:8541
A co-accused's bail does not automatically extend to another accused where their actual roles in the offence differ materially; delay caused by one's own defence counsel cannot later be used as a ground for bail.
Execution Petition · 2026:DHC:8567
An arbitral award must be adequately stamped before a court can enforce it; courts give only a limited window to cure such defects, after which the award becomes legally unusable until the deficiency is fixed.
Arbitration Petition · 2026:DHC:8555
A genuine settlement reached through mediation renders a pending arbitration-related court petition moot, allowing parties to close out litigation quickly once they resolve their dispute privately.
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Legal Case Shots is a searchable database of Supreme Court of India judgments, each broken down into the case type, the court's key holding, and a practical lesson learnt, with the full judgment available as a PDF for citation or deeper reading.
Following Supreme Court orders in the long-running M.C. Mehta environmental litigation, the government capped the import of raw pet-coke (RPC), a highly polluting fuel, at 1.4 million tonnes per annum, to be allocated among six "calciner" companies based on their production capacity as of 9 October 2018. Sanvira Industries, whose Consent-to-Operate (CTO) at that time showed a capacity of only 2,00,000 tonnes, repeatedly but unsuccessfully sought a larger allocation by claiming its true capacity was already 3,30,000 tonnes by that date. Years later, it obtained a fresh certificate from the Andhra Pradesh Pollution Control Board (APPCB) supporting the higher figure, and a government committee then revised its allocation upward: a change Rain CII Carbon, a competing calciner, challenged in the Delhi High Court.
The Supreme Court upheld the Delhi High Court's Division Bench ruling that had struck down the enhanced allocation. It held that the only capacity figure that legally mattered was what Sanvira's official Consent-to-Operate (CTO) showed as of 9 October 2018-2,00,000 tonnes, since that CTO document, not any later "clarification," was the basis on which the Court itself had fixed the 1.4-million-tonne cap. The CTO for the higher capacity was granted only in December 2019, over a year later, and Sanvira's repeated attempts to get its capacity backdated had already been rejected by the Supreme Court and the government committee on multiple prior occasions. Allowing a belated certificate to override the settled CTO-based allocation would undermine the integrity of the entire environmentally-driven quota scheme, so the appeals were dismissed.
In regulatory allocation schemes tied to a specific cut-off date, only the official record that existed as of that date controls: a company cannot retroactively upgrade its entitlement years later through a fresh certificate, especially after its claims to that effect have already been rejected multiple times.
