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Binod Kumar Pandey @ Vinod Kumar Pandey vs. The State of Jharkhand

Not available · 2025 INSC 1504Decided 16 Dec 2025
Not available
Justice Vikram Nath · Justice Sandeep Mehta

Background

The appellants were accused in an FIR registered at Police Station A.T.S. Ranchi alleging they were members of a gang run by one Aman Shrivastava, engaged in extortion of money from businessmen and its laundering through hawala channels, with large sums of cash recovered from some of the accused. The FIR invoked IPC offences as well as Sections 20 and 21 of the UAPA. A sanctioning authority had earlier twice declined to grant sanction to prosecute under the UAPA, but a third proposal (without any fresh material, merely invoking additional UAPA offences) resulted in sanction being granted on 3 October 2023. The appellants challenged this sanction order before the Jharkhand High Court, which dismissed their writ petitions, leading to these appeals.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that the third sanction order was legally unsustainable because it was passed without any new or substantive material being placed before the sanctioning authority beyond what had already led to two earlier refusals: merely adding more UAPA sections does not amount to fresh material. The Court also held that the State cannot be permitted to supplement or bolster the sanctioning material for the first time in appellate proceedings to retrospectively validate a defective sanction; the High Court's approach of deferring examination of the sanction's validity to after trial evidence was wrong, since a fundamentally defective sanction cannot be cured by a later trial. The Court accordingly set aside the High Court's judgment and quashed the sanction order dated 3 October 2023 along with the consequent UAPA prosecution, while permitting the prosecution to continue only for the ordinary IPC offences.

Lesson Learnt

A prosecuting authority cannot repeatedly resubmit the same sanction proposal after refusal and hope for a different outcome without genuinely fresh material, and once such a sanction is challenged, the State cannot patch it up with new material at the appellate stage; a defective foundational sanction vitiates the prosecution under that special law from the outset.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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