SAJJAD Vs. STATE OF JHARKHAND

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This criminal appeal has been preferred against the judgment and order of conviction and sentence passed by the learned trial court in Sessions Case No. 262/96-(A). It is submitted by counsel for the appellant that as this, appellant was absconding, his case was separated and an 'A' has been added to the case number.

(2.) We, hereby, direct the Registrar General of this court to send the papers of this criminal appeal along with the judgment of Sessions Case No. 262/96-(A) to be placed before Hon'ble the Chief Justice of this court mainly to bring to Her Lordship's kind notice the very fact that no standard procedure is followed by the trial courts while allotting numbers to the cases triable by sessions courts. It has been observed by this court earlier that trial court Judges have adopted different nomenclature to name the cases triable by the sessions court, i.e. some have named such cases as Sessions Trial while the others as Sessions Cases and now, looking to the present case, it appears that some new methodology has been adopted for naming the separated cases of the absconding accused, i.e. separated suffixing the sessions trial number with a capital 'A'. It appears that a free style has been adopted by the Judges of the trial court in numbering the cases in the State of Jharkhand and this habit of frequently changing the number of the cases triable by the sessions court should be curbed. Earlier, it came to our notice that even when a case was transferred to another court, a new number was allotted and in connection with this subject matter this court have already passed orders in I.A. 7625 of 2013 in Criminal Appeal (D.B.) No. 778 of 2008, wherein, it has been observed that even if a case is transferred from one court to another, its number can never be changed.

(3.) We also direct the Registrar General of this court to send the papers of the judgment delivered by the trial court in the Sessions Case No. 262/96-(A) to the Director, Judicial Academy, State of Jharkhand for the purpose of study only. The free style adopted by the trial court Judges in allotting numbers shall be stopped and there must be some uniformity in the said process. This faulty practice of numbering have serious repercussion in maintenance and retrieval of data-fed in the computerized database maintained by the High Court as per Pune Model adopted by all the High Courts in the country. In the said model, the data base possesses certain Core details and some Peripheral details to be filled up by this court and this type of erroneous methodology adopted by the Judges of the trial court results in serious complications in computerized data maintenance system. The process of allotting numbers to sessions cases should follow some standard norm to avoid anomaly in preservation and retrieval of data maintained by the High Court. This matter, therefore, shall be immediately placed before Hon'ble the Chief Justice of this court. This matter is adjourned to be listed on 22nd April, 2014.