The Supreme Court on Thursday objected to the Patna High Court passing bail orders that were to be effective only after five months.
A Bench of Justices Bela M Trivedi and Satish Chandra Sharma made it clear that the same cannot be done, and remanded the cases to the High Court for a fresh decision on merits.
"This is one of the few orders we have come across in last few days passed by the High Court, in which, without deciding the matter on merits, the High Court has granted the bail to the present petitioner, subject to the condition that the petitioner-accused shall furnish the bail bonds after five months of the passing of the order. There are no reasons assigned as to why the implementation of the order granting bail was postponed for five months ...In our opinion, no such condition could be imposed for grant of bail to a person/accused. If the Court is satisfied on merits, it should grant bail or otherwise, reject the same," the Court observed.
The observations came while disposing of criminal appeals filed against two orders of the Patna High Court that were passed last month.
The top court passed its order without seeking the response of the Bihar government, and listed both the bail pleas before the High Court on November 11.
Advocate Shivam Singh appeared for the accused in both the cases. The appeals were filed through Advocate Kailas Bajirao Autade.
The orders under challenge were passed by Justice Nawneet Kumar Pandey of the Patna High Court.
The Supreme Court had in July too taken exception to the trend of High Courts passing conditional bail orders that state that the bail shall come into effect after a period of six months or a year.
A Bench of Justices Abhay S Oka and Augustine George Masih eventually set aside a Patna High Court order which had said that a murder-accused should be released on bail, but only after six months.
Notably, the top court's order sheet in the instant case records the names of lawyers as being the 'arguing counsel', in what could be the first such development in line with its recent verdicts in this regard.
In September, the present Bench (led by Justice Trivedi) had ruled that advocates-on-record (AoR) in a given case must mark the appearance of only those lawyers who are authorized to appear and argue that case on the particular day.
Another Bench had recently directed that only lawyers who are present in court physically or online during hearings are allowed to mark their appearance for cases. The Bench opined that it is completely unfair if lawyers who were not present during the hearing mark their appearance.
[Read order]