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Bishwajit Dey v. The State of Assam

Criminal Appeal · 2025 INSC 32Decided 7 Jan 2025
Criminal Appeal No. 87 of 2025 (arising out of SLP (Crl.) No. 13370/2024)
Justice Sanjay Karol · Justice Manmohan

Background

The appellant owned a truck he used commercially, financed through monthly EMIs, which was stopped at a police checkpoint in Assam and found to be carrying concealed heroin. A third-party occupant of the truck was arrested and chargesheeted for the drug offence, but neither the appellant (the owner) nor his driver was named as an accused. The appellant's plea to get his seized truck released in the interim, so he could keep earning his livelihood, was rejected by the trial court and the Gauhati High Court, on the argument that the NDPS Act, a strict special law, does not allow interim release of vehicles used to carry drugs.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that the NDPS Act does not specifically bar interim release of a seized vehicle, and that the general provisions of the Cr.P.C. (Sections 451 and 457) can be invoked for this purpose where the Act itself is silent. The Court laid down four scenarios for when drugs are found in a vehicle (from the owner having no connection at all, to the owner or his agent being directly involved) and held that only in the first two should the vehicle stay seized until trial. Since neither the appellant nor his driver was accused of any knowledge or connivance in this case, the truck was ordered released on "superdari" (interim custody) with safeguards like photographing/videographing it and a bond not to sell it, since keeping it parked in the open at a police station indefinitely would only let it rot to everyone's loss.

Lesson Learnt

An innocent vehicle owner whose vehicle is misused by someone else to carry contraband is not automatically deprived of it for the length of a criminal trial. Courts can and should release such a vehicle on conditions, rather than let it decay uselessly in police custody, as long as the owner wasn't complicit.

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

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