The Verdictum: Justice Deepak Verma

Each week, The Verdictum examines the judgments delivered by a retired judge of the Supreme Court. Along with analysis of the numbers, The Verdictum also analyses various facts and figures associated with the judge. This week, we examine the number of judgments delivered by Justice Deepak Verma.Appointed to the Supreme Court on May 11, 2009, J. Verma had A tenure of 1206 days in the apex court. Prior to his elevation to the Supreme Court he was a judge of the High Courts of Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Rajasthan for a total of fifteen years. Like his contemporary, J. Dalveer Bhandari, J. Verma was a Chief Justice of a High Court (Rajasthan) with a tenure of just over two months, before being elevated to the apex court. Aged forty-seven years when made a High Court judge, J. Verma was sixty-two years old when he entered the Supreme Court..His first judgment was delivered three days into his tenure, in a 3-judge Bench that included the then Chief Justice of India, KG Balakrishnan and the future CJI, J. P Sathashivam. In all, J. Verma was involved in a total of 323 judgments out of which he authored 19 judgments. J. Verma was also in a 3-judge or larger Bench on 38 occasions..Year Wise Distribution.When it comes to year-wise distribution, J. Verma appears to have disposed of almost same number of matters during his tenure, with the highest being 2011 when he delivered 112 judgments followed by 2010 (100) and 2009 (103). However in his final year, there looks like an abrupt drop in judgments delivered with only 8 recorded judgments available for the 8 months that J. Verma was a judge of the Supreme Court in 2012..Month-wise breakdown of judgments.July remained one of the most productive months for J. Verma with more than 20% of the total number of judgments delivered in this month across his tenure. This was followed by August and September; in total around 45% of all his judgments were delivered in the three months following the summer vacation of the Supreme Court. Five judgments are recorded for the month of June, the lowest number followed by January (11) and February (12)..Month-wise productivity .J. Verma delivered an average of 0.84 judgments per day over his three-year tenure with the month of July being the most productive (2.26) followed by August and April. The least productive days were those in January followed by February and November..Bench-wise distribution of judgments .J. Verma sat with only fourteen separate judges in Division Benches, less than half the number of judges that J. Dalveer Bhandari sat with. In terms of number of judgments, J. Verma was most proficient while sitting with J. Bhandari (147) with SB Sinha coming in second place with 59 judgments..*Source: www.judis.nic.in.Lead image taken from here.(Bar & Bench would like to thank interns Amiya Pati and Aishwarya Dhakarey for their research and assistance in data compilation)