HC refuses pre-arrest bail to lawyer booked for forging court order

The Bombay High Court rejected the anticipatory bail plea of a lawyer accused of giving a forged court order and bail bond receipt and extracting ₹90,000 from a murder case accused's wife. The court stated that the offense is detrimental to the legal system and corrodes public faith. The lawyer has been booked under several sections of the Indian Penal Code.

MUMBAI: The Bombay high court (HC) on Thursday rejected anticipatory bail plea of a lawyer booked by the Dahisar police for allegedly giving forged court order and bail bond amount receipt to the wife of a murder case accused and extracting an amount of ₹90,000 from her.

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“This offence does not only cause harm to the victim in this case, but it is also fundamentally detrimental to the entire legal system,” said a single judge bench of justice Sarang Kotwal while rejecting pre-arrest bail plea of advocate Hiral Chandrakant Jadhav. “This kind of offence corrodes the faith which the public has in the entire system,” the bench added.

On October 21, 2023, the lawyer was booked by the Dahisar police under sections 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property), 465 (forgery), 466 (forgery of a record of court or of public register) 467 (forgery of valuable security, will etc.), 468 (forgery for the purpose of harming reputation), 471 (using as genuine a forged document) of the Indian Penal Code.

The FIR was registered based on a complaint lodged by the wife of the murder accused, on whose behalf advocate Jadhav had filed a bail application. The lawyer had demanded a sum of ₹65,000 for filing and arguing bail plea of her husband and had filed his bail plea before the Dindoshi court on August 11, 2022, soon after she received the amount.

On October 10 last year, the lawyer called the complainant and informed her that the court had granted bail to her husband on furnishing bail bond of ₹25,000, gave her the name of the presiding officer who granted bail to her husband and called her to high court for paying the amount of ₹25,000.

Accordingly, the informant and her relatives went to high court and paid the amount to advocate Jadhav, after which the lawyer gave them a sealed envelope, claiming it contained the bail order and the receipt for ₹25,000.

As instructed by the lawyer, the next day – on October 29 – the complainant and her relatives went to Thane central jail and dropped the envelope in a box placed outside the prison for dropping bail orders. As her husband did not come out for hours, the woman enquired with the jail staff and found out that the documents were incomplete, and the envelope did not contain the receipt for the bail amount. The envelope was then returned to the woman.

Two days later the complainant met the lawyer, who gave her another envelope and asked her to drop it in the same box. The complainant did what she was told to, but her husband did not get out on bail. The episode was repeated twice again after which the complainant started suspecting some foul play and enquired with the Dindoshi court registry and found out that neither the bail order nor the receipt was issued by the court.

Apprehending arrest in the case, advocate Jadhav moved high court, claiming that she had returned the entire amount she had taken from the complainant and that she had no dishonest intention to cheat her. Her lawyer further claimed that there was neither any wrongful gain to anyone nor any wrongful loss to someone else.

The argument, however, failed to impress upon justice Kotwal. “I strongly disagree with the submissions made by learned counsel for the Applicant that there was no ‘dishonest intention’ or ‘fraudulent intention’ on the part of the Applicant,” said the court. “In fact, her act cannot be described in any other manner but ‘dishonest’ and ‘fraudulent.’”

The court rejected her pre-arrest bail plea, observing that no words were sufficient to deprecate the practice adopted by the lawyer. The bench said the confidence with which the offence was committed indicated that this may not be an isolated instance and to unearth such similar instances, the lawyer’s custodial interrogation is necessary.