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Pinku Etc. v. The State of Uttar Pradesh

Criminal Appeal · 2018 INSC 960Decided 11 Oct 2018
Criminal Appeal Nos. 1277-1278 of 2018
Justice Kurian Joseph · Justice S. Abdul Nazeer

Background

The appellants had been in custody since 2005, and their appeals against conviction, filed in 2007, were still pending before the High Court more than a decade later. Their applications for suspension of sentence or bail during the pendency of those appeals had been rejected by the High Court. The State conceded that the appellants faced other, separate cases predating the present incident, and it emerged that a co-accused from the same FIR had already been released on bail by a coordinate bench of the Supreme Court in an earlier, related matter.

Decision Breakdown

Given the extremely long pendency of the appeals and the fact that a co-accused in the same case had already secured bail from the Supreme Court, the Court held that the appellants, too, should be released on bail while their appeals remained pending before the High Court. It allowed the appeals and directed release on bail subject to strict conditions to be fixed by the trial court, unless the appellants were required to be detained in some other case.

Lesson Learnt

Prolonged pendency of a criminal appeal, combined with parity with a co-accused already granted bail in the same case, is a strong ground for the Supreme Court to grant bail even where lower courts have refused it: bail decisions must account for how long an undertrial or convict has already spent in custody awaiting a final hearing.

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

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