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State (NCT of Delhi) v. Brijesh Singh @ Arun Kumar

Criminal Appeal · 2017 INSC 1018Decided 9 Oct 2017
Criminal Appeal No. 1750 of 2017
Justice S.A. Bobde · Justice L. Nageswara Rao

Background

The respondents had been discharged by a Special MCOCA Court in Delhi of organised-crime charges, and the Delhi High Court upheld that discharge. The State of NCT of Delhi appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the respondents' alleged crime syndicate activities, spanning multiple FIRs, including ones registered outside Delhi (in Uttar Pradesh), should still count toward the "continuing unlawful activity" threshold needed to invoke MCOCA in Delhi.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that charge-sheets filed in competent courts outside Delhi can indeed be counted toward establishing a "continuing unlawful activity" under MCOCA, rejecting the respondents' argument that only Delhi-based cases could count. However, the Court also held that an actual act of organised crime must still have been committed within Delhi for MCOCA to apply there at all, and after examining the record found no evidence that the respondents possessed property or committed any qualifying organised crime within Delhi: the complaint had effectively been engineered to be filed in Delhi only to invoke MCOCA's jurisdiction. The Court therefore upheld the discharge of the respondents, though for different legal reasons than the High Court had given.

Lesson Learnt

Being named across multiple criminal cases in different states does not, by itself, let a state invoke a stringent special law like MCOCA: there must be concrete evidence that an organised crime was actually committed within that state's own territory, not just a paper trail designed to create jurisdiction.

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

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