SC seeks data from high courts on persons yet to get bail in pending appeals
The top court directed high court registrar generals to submit data on the number of pending appeals against conviction and appeals against acquittal
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday ordered high courts across the country to provide data on the number of criminal appeals where persons are still languishing in jail without getting bail.
The court sought the data while hearing a suo motu petition on release of undertrials languishing in jail and for taking up premature release cases of life convicts entitled for release after undergoing a minimum of 14 years sentence under various state jail manuals.
“We direct registrar generals of all high courts to submit data on the number of appeals against conviction and appeals against acquittal pending before single judge and division benches,” a bench comprising justices Abhay S Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan said.
The bench also told high courts to furnish bifurcation of appeals where accused have been granted bail and those where they are not granted bail.
The information has to be supplied within a month to the Registrar (Judicial) of the top court, the bench said. It will take up the case on March 24.
The court passed the order after going through an elaborate report prepared by senior advocates Liz Mathew and Gaurav Agarwal, assisting the court as amici curiae. The report indicated an increase in the pendency of criminal appeals in high courts and the quantum of pendency extending to more than 30 years in some high courts.
The report based on data from the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) till February 7 pointed out that a total of 758,510 criminal appeals form part of the judicial docket across 25 high courts in the country. According to the list, the pendency of criminal appeals was high in high courts such as Allahabad (233,909), Madhya Pradesh (115,357), Punjab and Haryana (82,384), Rajasthan (61,342) and Patna (44,143).
On January 30, the top court modified its 2021 judgment on ad-hoc judges by permitting all high courts to take recourse to Article 224A of the Constitution of India (that provides for retired judges to be re-appointed as ad hoc judges) for appointing between 2 to 5 ad-hoc judges but not exceeding 10% of the sanctioned strength. This measure was taken considering the huge number of pending criminal appeals in the high courts. The top court further directed the ad-hoc judges to decide only criminal appeals while sitting on a bench presided over by a sitting judge of the said high court.
The report presented to the court on Monday showed that the high courts of Tripura, Madras, Sikkim, Meghalaya and Manipur had the lowest pending criminal appeals. Presenting a separate chart on the duration of the appeals in the high court, in 10 high courts, there were such appeals pending for over 30 years. Of them, the Allahabad high court had 20,502 cases, followed by high courts of Calcutta (982), Rajasthan (891), and Telangana (447).
