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Ramyash @ Lal Bahadur v. The State of Uttar Pradesh and Anr. Etc. Etc.

Criminal Appeal · 2025 INSC 544Decided 23 Apr 2025
Criminal Appeal Nos. 1153-1155 of 2021 (with Criminal Appeal No. 1175 of 2021)
Justice B.R. Gavai · Justice Augustine George Masih

Background

After a violent land-dispute altercation in 2012 that killed the appellant's father, a trial court convicted three accused persons of murder (Section 302 IPC) and the Allahabad High Court's Division Bench upheld that conviction in a first judgment in 2018. Later, the same accused persons filed a "correction application" claiming the court's own internal register showed the appeals had actually been "partly allowed" in open court, and the High Court then substantially rewrote its own final five paragraphs, downgrading the conviction from murder to the lesser offence of culpable homicide (Section 304 Part II IPC) and sharply reducing the sentences.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that Section 362 of the Code of Criminal Procedure strictly forbids a court from altering or reviewing a signed judgment except to fix a genuine clerical or arithmetical slip: an accidental error in writing or calculation, not a change of substance or reasoning. Comparing the two High Court judgments side by side, the Court found the "correction" was not a typo fix at all but a complete reversal of the Court's own reasoning and conclusion on guilt, which is exactly what Section 362 prohibits, relying on its own precedent (Sooraj Devi and Naresh v. State of U.P.) that a court cannot use its inherent powers to sidestep this express bar. The Court restored the original 2018 judgment convicting the accused of murder, quashed the improper "corrected" judgment, and directed the accused to surrender to serve out their original sentences, while leaving them free to separately challenge the original 2018 judgment on its own merits if they choose.

Lesson Learnt

Once a court formally pronounces and signs a judgment, it cannot go back and substantively change its verdict later by calling it a mere "clerical correction": that power is reserved strictly for fixing typos or calculation mistakes, and litigants should be alert to this limit if a court later tries to revisit a final decision.

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

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