Trial ends only after sentencing or acquittal order, says top court
NEW DELHI: A trial comes to an end only after the quantum of punishment is delivered or an order of acquittal is passed, a constitution bench of the Supreme Court declared on Monday, ruling that a new accused can be summoned at any stage before the trial concludes in law.
Outlining the scope of Section 319 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) that empowers a court to summon additional accused at any stage of the trial, the five-judge bench held that a trial cannot be said to be finished even after the other accused in the case are held guilty but the punishment is yet to be pronounced.
“The conclusion of the trial in a criminal prosecution, if it ends in conviction, a judgment is considered to be complete in all respects only when the sentence is imposed on the convict... Similarly, in a case where there are more than one accused and if one or more among them are acquitted and the others are convicted, the trial would stand concluded as against the accused who are acquitted and the trial will have to be concluded against the convicted accused with the imposition of sentence,” it said.
The bench comprised justices SA Nazeer, BR Gavai, AS Bopanna, V Ramasubramanian and BV Nagarathna.
On the ambit of Section 319, the court said the power under the provision can only be invoked before the sentencing in case of a conviction or ahead of the acquittal order, as the case may be. The bench also laid down guidelines for trial courts to use the authority under Section 319. It said that once an application to summon some new accused is moved, a court must pause the trial and first decide the plea. If additional accused are summoned, the court should take a call on whether a joint trial should proceed or if the trial against those already in the dock can be segregated. If the trials are segregated, the top court said, the same evidence cannot be used in both trials and that the trial against the new accused should be conducted as a fresh trial.
After clarifying the legal position, the bench said that the individual cases may be listed before smaller benches to apply the ruling on the factual aspects arising in each case.
The five-judge bench was dealing with a bunch of petitions, including one by Punjab Congress MLA Sukhpal Singh Khaira who was summoned in a drugs case after some of the other accused in the case were convicted and sentenced by a trial court in October 2017. Khaira challenged the summoning order in the Punjab and Haryana high court on the ground that the trial in the case had already concluded with the conviction and order on sentence, but to no avail. After he moved the apex court, in 2019, a three-judge bench referred the matter to the constitution bench to authoritatively lay down the law as to the actual stage at which the trial is said to have concluded, noting the power under Section 319 of CrPC is extraordinary in nature and that it can be invoked at any stage of the “trial”.