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‘If you are unable to handle…’ SC raps UP govt over 853 pending bail pleas
The court asked additional advocate general Garima Parshad for information on how many of them were single offence cases that could be considered on priority for bail.
Uttar Pradesh has two weeks to decide to release prisoners languishing in jail for over a decade, either on bail or premature release, or face a blanket order for bail from the Supreme Court, an apex court bench said on Monday, upset over the failure of the state government to act on the issue.
“If you are unable to handle it, we will take it upon ourselves and handle it,” said a bench of justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and MM Sundresh on being told that there are 853 cases where persons are in custody for more than 10 years and their criminal appeals have not been decided.
The court asked additional advocate general Garima Parshad for information on how many of them were single offence cases that could be considered on priority for bail. The state was yet to scrutinize the list and segregate single offence offenders from those facing multiple cases, Parshad said.
Posting the matter for further hearing on August 17, the bench said, “Two weeks’ time is granted to the state. Let a list be filed of the 853 cases with the serial numbers, time period spent in custody and in which of these cases the State is opposing the bail and the grounds for the same.”
Finding such a large number of prisoners who are incarcerated with neither their appeal nor bail application been decided by the high court at the Allahabad and Lucknow benches, the top court judges said, “Having laid down norms, it should not take weeks to dispose of these applications….We will pass a blanket order granting bail.”
On May 9, when the matter was last heard, the court was informed by the state and the Allahabad high court that in jails in Uttar Pradesh, bail pleas of 350 convicts are pending for over a decade and 159 are those who have been incarcerated for more than 15 years.
Last week, the high court filed yet another status report in the top court, informing that since the time of filing of the earlier affidavit in April till July 17, out of 350, only 62 bail applications remain to be decided. However, it said 232 fresh bail applications have been filed during this period.
As per the high court’s latest report, there are 853 cases pending of criminal appeals, where the person in custody has spent over 10 years in prison. To enable further decongestion of jails, the bench allowed the state to consider permanent parole for persons who were aged less than 60 years.
The orders passed on Monday came on a bail plea filed by a person called Suleman, who had been in jail for 12 years with no bench available in the high court to take up his criminal appeal. The petitioner highlighted the grim reality of the state’s jails by pointing out the case of other prisoners worse off than him, who have been languishing in jail for more than 15 years without bail.
In the last order, the bench had observed, “What is of concern to us is cases which are pending for 10 years and 14 years in appeal, where bail applications are also pending and some of them are in incarceration even without pending bail applications as they may have been disposed of.”
The state has a remission policy in place by which persons charged of single offence cases are referred for remission after 14 years of incarceration and 20 years with remission. The bench had suggested the state to consider taking up single offence cases in one go by taking a stand in respect of such cases where persons are languishing for over 10 years, and unless there are special circumstances, all of them could even be released on bail.
It was following this order the state came with latest figures, but the road map to deal with such cases was lacking.
