TRILOCHAN DAS Vs. STATE

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THIS revision raises an interesting question of law. Petitioners 1 and 2 (namely Trilochan Das and Radha Charan Das) along with other petitioners and another person named Krushna Chandra Das were convicted and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment by the Additional Sessions Judge of Cuttack on 11.5.1956. On 14.5.1956 their appeal was admitted by the High Court and they were directed to be released on bail. Eventually on 20.12.1957 the conviction of petitioners 1 and 2 and the sentence of three years rigorous imprisonment passed on each of them by the learned Additional Sessions Judge were maintained by the High Court by its Judgment in Criminal Appeal No. 65 of 1956.

(2.) MR . Sahu for the petitioners urged that as soon as the appellate judgment was delivered by this Court, it was the duty of the lower Court to take immediate steps to apprehend the convicted persons and send them to jail to serve out the unexpired portion of their sentence and that on account of the negligence of the Court concerned they were not actually sent to jail till they surrendered sometime in March 1960. He rightly invited my attention to Section 383, Criminal Procedure Code which says that as soon as a sentence is pronounced the Court shall forthwith forward the warrant to the jail for the detention of the accused person.

(3.) MR . Sahu cited a decision of the Lahore High Court reported in Gulzar Mohammad v. The Crown, 52 Cri LJ 238, regarding the construction of Section 397, Criminal Procedure Code I have carefully gone through the judgment in that case, but find that it has absolutely no application to the facts of the present case. There, three sentences were pronounced on an accused in Court at the same time, and he was immediately taken into custody. In such circumstances, the learned Judge held that the second and third sentences must be deemed to have been pronounced when the accused was undergoing the sentence of imprisonment for the first offence which had also been pronounced immediately before. Here, however, the petitioners were not taken into jail custody at all till they surrendered in March 1960.