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Patiala woman gets 3-month bail in drugs case after she pleads for child’s safety amid Covid-19 pandemic
The woman was given bail even as the Patiala civil surgeon had suggested that she be kept in a crèche with her newborn and two other women inmates.
The Punjab and Haryana high court on Wednesday granted bail to a Patiala woman accused in a drug seizure case after she pleaded for her newborn’s safety amid the Covid-19 outbreak.
The woman was given bail even as the Patiala civil surgeon had suggested that she be kept in a crèche with her newborn and two other women inmates. However, the court observed that the women inmates were not health experts and could not guarantee the petitioner’s safety amid the pandemic outbreak. It was on April 9 that the HC had sought an opinion from the civil surgeon on a place that would be safer for the newborn — the jail or her village.
The bench of justice Arvind Singh Sangwan granted the woman three-month bail, while directing Patiala central jail superintendent to release her forthwith after obtaining an undertaking from one of her blood relatives that she would appear before the trial court within a period of 14 days to furnish bail bonds.
The petitioner, who has been in judicial custody for more than eight months, gave birth on April 1 in a Patiala hospital. She was pregnant when the police had booked her on July 10, 2019, in Rajpura. Charges were framed against her on December 20, 2019.
It was alleged that a police party had spotted her carrying a polythene bag which she threw into a canal upon seeing them. Later, the police had allegedly found 80 injections of buprenorphine and 80 injections of avil phineramine maleate in the bag.
In her plea, she had argued that she had no previous history of involvement in any drug-related operations and had accused the cops of shoddy probe in the matter.
