The Verdictum: Justice (Retd.) Shiva Kirti Singh

Justice Shiva Kirti Singh was elevated to the Supreme Court of India on September 19, 2013. After a tenure that lasted a little over three years, or 1150 days, Justice Singh retired in November last year..Justice Singh comes from a family of lawyers and judges; his father was a judge of the Patna High Court, while his maternal grandfather, Justice BP Sinha, was the sixth Chief Justice of India, from 1959 to 1964..He enrolled as an advocate in 1977 and was designated as a Senior Advocate thirteen years later. In 1998, he was appointed as a judge of the Patna High Court, where he served as Acting Chief Justice for four months. He was later transferred as Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court in October 2012..At his farewell ceremony held in November, Justice Shiva Kirti Singh recommended that judges of the higher judiciary be selected by a competitive exam on the lines of the UPSC exam. Looking back on his career, he was quoted as saying,.“I enrolled in 1977 when my father was a judge. Even as a raw junior, I used to get many briefs and it puzzled me. Later a Senior told me the reason and I went into a shell for two years till my father retired as a judge in 1979.”.Month-wise distribution of rulings.During his tenure at the apex court, Justice Singh was involved in delivering 211 reported judgments, of which he authored 78..He averaged around 20 rulings per month, his most productive months being February and January, with 33 and 25 rulings respectively. That number dropped to as low as 6 in May and 11 in July..Day-wise productivity.Justice Shiva Kirti Singh made an average of 0.2 rulings per day, which translates to roughly one ruling every five days..Year-wise distribution of rulings.He made just 4 rulings in 2013, the year he was appointed. That number steadily increased in the following years, with 86 rulings being made in the year he demitted office..YearNo. of rulings20134201452201569201686.Bench-wise distribution of rulings.He was part of a nine-judge Constitution Bench once, a five-judge Bench four times and a three-judge bench forty times. He shared the bench most with Justice Vikramajit Sen, with whom he sat 47 times. He also sat with Justice Dipak Misra 40 times and Justices FMI Kalifulla and MY Eqbal 17 times each..Case-type distribution of rulings.147 of Justice Singh’s rulings were in civil appeals, while 43 were in criminal appeals. He also decided a total of 14 writ petitions (9 civil, 5 criminal), one review petition and one Special Reference..Notable judgments.He was part of the Bench that delivered the judgment in Shatrugan Chauhan & Ors. v. Union of India, commuting the death sentence of 15 convicts to life imprisonment. In this case, the Bench held that inordinate delay in execution can be a ground for commuting the death sentence..A similar stance was taken by the exact same bench in V Sriharan @ Murugan v. Union of India..He was also part of the Bench that upheld the constitutional validity of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2000 while hearing a PIL filed by Subramanian Swamy in the aftermath of the Delhi gang rape of December 2013. In that petition, Swamy prayed that one of the assailants, who was a minor, be tried as an adult..Along with Justice Vikramajit Sen, he upheld the decision of the Kerala High Court to impose the liquor ban in the state. He was also part of the three-judge bench that gave the green signal to the controversial NEET exam..In his last month as an apex court judge, he was part of a five-judge Constitution bench that gave its opinion in a Presidential reference. In that case, it was held that the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, 2004 was unconstitutional..Just before retiring, he found himself part of the nine-judge bench that upheld the constitutional validity of entry tax in Jindal Stainless Ltd & Anr. v. State of Haryana..Image taken from Supreme Court annual report.