The file went from the prosecutor upward for 430 days, and the corruption acquittal now stands for good

An anti-corruption agency lost its case, took a certified copy, and then spent more than a year routing a proposal through its own hierarchy. The High Court refuses to condone the delay, and with it the appeal.

A Special Judge under the Prevention of Corruption Act at Rewa acquitted the respondent of offences punishable under Section 7 and Section 13(1)(d) read with Section 13(2) of that Act. The Special Police Establishment wanted to appeal. On 23 September 2026 Justice Sanjeev S. Kalgaonkar held it had left it far too late.

Leave, and the clock on it

A State or its agency cannot appeal against an acquittal as of right. It must first obtain leave to appeal, and the application for leave carries its own limitation period — ninety days from the date of the judgment of acquittal.

The application here was presented with a delay of 430 days: more than a year and two months beyond the prescribed period. It was therefore accompanied by an application under Section 5 of the Limitation Act asking the Court to condone that delay.

Nothing in the record suggests the delay was deliberate or that the respondent was prejudiced by it beyond the uncertainty of an unresolved acquittal. The difficulty was simply that the explanation did not cover the ground it needed to.

Where the time went

The explanation offered is an account of an internal file moving through an organisation, and the judgment sets out its stages.

The certified copy of the impugned judgment was obtained on 24 September 2017. A proposal for assailing the judgment was sent by the District Prosecution Officer to the Superintendent of Police, Special Police Establishment. It was then forwarded to the Additional Director General.

Each of those steps is ordinary administration. Taken together, and measured against a ninety-day limit, they consumed more than five times the period the statute allows.

Red tape as a reason

The applicant's case, put squarely, was that the delay is attributable to red tape and the procedural delay involved in the functioning of public authorities — and that courts take a liberal approach to delay in matters involving public machinery.

There is authority for that liberality, and the judgment quotes it. In State of Nagaland v. Lipok AO the Supreme Court observed that on account of an impersonal machinery — nobody in charge of the matter being directly hurt by the judgment appealed against — and an inherited bureaucratic methodology of note-making, file-pushing and passing on the buck, delay on the State's part is less difficult to understand though more difficult to approve, and that the State, representing the collective cause of the community, should not be treated as an ordinary litigant.

The respondent met that with a more recent decision. Relying on Shivamma v. Karnataka Housing Board (2025), counsel contended that State authorities deserve no special treatment in explaining delay; sufficient cause must be established like anyone else; and the reasons pleaded here were vague and unsatisfactory.

Why it was not enough

Condonation under Section 5 requires sufficient cause. Courts are ordinarily generous to the State on the footing that government decisions pass through hands and that impersonal machinery moves slowly — but that generosity has limits, and the limits are tested by the length of the delay and the quality of the explanation for each part of it.

Having considered the explanation, the Court held that the applicant had failed to satisfactorily explain the delay of 430 days.

The word doing the work is “satisfactorily”. An account that says a proposal went from one officer to another, and then to a third, describes what happened without explaining why each stage took as long as it did. Where the total runs to fourteen months past the deadline, a narrative of routine internal movement does not discharge the burden.

The tension between those two lines of authority is real, and this judgment resolves it the way most recent decisions do: the State's institutional character explains delay, it does not excuse it, and the explanation still has to account for the time actually taken.

The ninety-day period is itself a relaxation, being longer than the limitation for most appeals, and it exists because the decision to appeal an acquittal is institutional rather than personal. A period designed around that reality is not easily extended by pointing to the same reality again.

What follows

The application under Section 5 of the Limitation Act was dismissed. Consequently the criminal miscellaneous case itself was dismissed.

The consequence for the prosecution is final in a way that a dismissal on merits would not necessarily have been. Because leave was never granted, the High Court never looked at whether the acquittal was right. The respondent’s acquittal on the corruption charges stands, not because it was examined and upheld, but because the agency that lost never got its challenge through the door.

There is a wider cost too. An acquittal in a corruption trial that the prosecuting agency believed was wrong now stands unexamined, and the reason is administrative rather than judicial.

For prosecuting agencies the practical reading is about internal timelines rather than legal argument. The ninety days runs from the judgment, not from the day a proposal reaches the officer competent to approve it — and a file that has to climb from a District Prosecution Officer to an Additional Director General needs to start climbing immediately.