Arrested in October 2020, and the trial has still not started because the court is waiting for the Muddemal

Justice Milind N. Jadhav granted bail on the ground of long incarceration alone, recording that the ignominy of a trial not commencing in the near foreseeable future was apparent.

The applicant was arrested on 19 October 2020. When his bail application was decided on 7 October 2026 he had been in custody for five years, eleven months and nineteen days. The offence he is charged with is murder, and the judgment is careful never to minimise that. What it records instead is a fact about the court rather than about him: the trial has not commenced, because it is awaiting the Muddemal — the case property.

The charges

The application was made under Section 483 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, in connection with a crime registered in 2020 at the Chaturshrungi Police Station in Pune. The offences charged are under Sections 302, 307, 506(2) and 504 of the Indian Penal Code, Sections 4 and 25 of the Arms Act, 1959, and Section 135 of the Maharashtra Police Act, 1951.

That combination — murder, attempt to murder, criminal intimidation and arms offences — is as serious as a bail application gets. It is precisely why the reasoning given matters.

The ground that was enough on its own

The Court did not grant bail on the merits of the prosecution case, and said so more than once. It recorded that it was granting bail “without delineating any opinion on merits of the matter lest it should affect the trial”, and that the applicant had made out a case for bail on the ground of long incarceration.

The operative sentence is about the prospect rather than the past: the ignominy of the trial not commencing in the near foreseeable future is apparent. Six years of custody is one fact; six years of custody with no date on which evidence will begin is a different one, and it is the second that the Court acted on.

For authority it relied on two earlier bail applications of this Court and, recently, on the Delhi High Court in Raghvendr Singh v. State of NCT of Delhi, where bail was granted to an accused indicted for murder citing his long incarceration of five and a half years. Another of the decisions relied on had granted bail to an accused who had been in prison for a period of more than five years.

Why the case property matters

A trial that cannot start because the Muddemal has not been produced is not stalled by any party. The case property is what the prosecution must place before the court to prove what was seized and from whom; until the trial court has it, the examination of witnesses on the recoveries cannot usefully begin.

The consequence, when the accused is in custody, is that the period of detention stops bearing any relation to the progress of the case against him. He is not being delayed by his own adjournments, and there is no stage of the trial that his release could disrupt, because no stage has been reached. The Court's phrase — the near foreseeable future — marks the point at which the absence of a timetable becomes a reason in itself.

The conditions

Bail was granted on eight conditions, and they are the ones a court imposes when it is conscious of the seriousness of the charge.

The applicant was directed to be released immediately in connection with the crime, on furnishing a personal recognisance bond of ₹25,000 with one surety in the like amount. He must report to the investigating officer at the police station once every month, on the first Monday of the month between 10 a.m. and 12 noon. He must cooperate with the conduct of the trial and attend the trial court on all dates unless specifically exempted, and must not take unnecessary adjournments — if he does, that will entitle the prosecution to apply for revocation of the order. He must not leave the State of Maharashtra without the prior permission of the trial court, must not influence any witness or tamper with the evidence in any manner, and must keep the investigating officer informed of his current address and mobile number and of any change in them. Any infraction of the conditions will entail cancellation of the bail.

The Court clarified that the observations made in the order are limited to the purpose of granting bail, that it had made no observations on the merits of the case, and that the trial shall be adjudicated on the strength of the evidence led and strictly on its own merits, uninfluenced by any prima facie observation in the order.

The bail application was allowed and disposed of in those terms. Mr Siddharth Sutaria appeared for the applicant and Ms Anuja S. Gotad, Additional Public Prosecutor, for the State, with the investigating officer present.