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Talat Sanvi vs. State of Jharkhand & Anr.

Criminal Appeal · 2023 INSC 80Decided 24 Jan 2023
Criminal Appeal No. 205 of 2023
Sanjay Kishan Kaul · Abhay S. Oka

Background

Talat Sanvi sought anticipatory bail from the Jharkhand High Court. The High Court granted it, but attached a condition requiring the accused to pay "interim victim compensation" to the complainant as the price of remaining free from arrest. The accused appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that such a condition has no basis in law.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that the condition was legally flawed and quashed it, while leaving the grant of anticipatory bail itself intact. It recalled that in two earlier appeals from the same High Court: Sahab Alam vs. State of Jharkhand (August 2022) and Udho Thakur vs. State of Jharkhand (September 2022). It had already disapproved of bail being tied to depositing large sums of money, observing that bail cannot depend on whether a person can afford to pay, and that pre-arrest bail proceedings are not money-recovery proceedings. This case went one step further by labelling the payment as "victim compensation". The Court traced the history of victim compensation and explained that under Section 357 of the Criminal Procedure Code, compensation to a victim is ordered only when the accused is sentenced after trial: that is, only once it has been decided whether the offence was committed at all. Relying on Dharmesh vs. State of Gujarat (2021), it reiterated that compensation cannot be determined at the bail stage, and, describing the High Court's order as a "judicial misadventure", struck down the condition and allowed the appeal.

Lesson Learnt

Bail is about securing the accused's presence at trial, not about collecting money for the complainant. A court cannot force an accused to pay "compensation" to a victim as a condition of bail, because until the trial is over nobody has been found guilty: compensation comes only with conviction.

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

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