High Court judgments and orders from across India, with the legal point made clear.
The defence said oral dying declarations made to a wife, a son and a brother-in-law cannot carry a murder conviction. A Division Bench of the Patna High Court disagrees and affirms a life sentence.
The same two judges, on the same day, upheld one detention under the same Act and quashed this one. The difference is what the State did with the ordinary law before reaching for the extraordinary.
The Payment of Wages Act assumes an employer and an employee. Where the man guarding the pipeline was engaged by contractors and not by the department, the Assistant Commissioner of Labour had nothing to adjudicate.
A toddy tapper knocked down in 2017 was valued by the Tribunal at Rs 5,000 a month. On an oral cross-objection with no appeal of their own, his family walk away with Rs 11.43 lakh.
The Gauhati High Court affirms the conviction of three men for the rape and murder of two minor girls, and declines to confirm the death sentence — because the prosecution led no evidence at all on whether they could be reformed.
The witness had said so on affidavit and was never asked about it in the box. The Himachal Pradesh High Court holds that the objection came far too late, and upholds the cheque-bounce conviction.
The bar in the Registration of Money Lenders Act stops a civil suit and the execution of a decree. It says nothing about a cheque-bounce complaint — and a revision filed in 2014 is decided on that footing twelve years later.
A conviction for aggravated penetrative sexual assault is affirmed and the sentence trimmed to the time already served plus remission. Then the Division Bench turns to a line in the West Bengal scheme nobody had applied.
A family quarrel over jamabandi and a sale deed became a forgery prosecution on a complaint filed years after the events. The Patna High Court quashes it as a civil wrong with no element of criminality.
The Board and the Sessions Court both refused, reasoning that he might offend again. Section 12 allows refusal on three grounds, and the Patna High Court holds that was not one of them properly applied.
A writ court cannot sit as an appellate authority over a detaining officer's satisfaction. It can only ask whether the relevant material was considered — and the Karnataka High Court finds that it was.
Thirty-nine years after the first notification, the Karnataka High Court has set aside a Single Judge's order quashing the acquisition of about an acre and a half next to a DRDO artificial intelligence laboratory in Bengaluru.
Convicted of preparing to commit dacoity on a night in 2006, he has been in the criminal process for two decades. The conviction stands; the three-year term comes down to two.
Nineteen years after a fertiliser buyer was stabbed on the road home, the State's appeal against the acquittal of two men is dismissed summarily — a power the High Court holds it keeps even after granting leave.
A contempt petition filed in 2017 over non-compliance with a 2014 order is dismissed as not maintainable before a Single Judge — decided on the doctrine of merger, twelve years after the order it sought to enforce.
Faced with a claim that the widow's marriage was bigamous and therefore void, the Court answers on standing rather than on Section 11 — the man who lived there had no locus to raise it, and the husband never did.
Fifty trees felled, a pathway blocked, an assault unregistered — three unrelated grievances, one bench, one day, and the same answer about a remedy nobody had tried.
A deed of gift to a child, questioned because the registration was never completed, survives a second appeal — on the principle that what remained undone was not the donor's to do.
A permanent employee's explanation was noticed and rejected, the notice for a departmental enquiry was issued but never acted on, and his own admission was treated as proof. The High Court orders reinstatement pending a proper proceeding.
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 Tribunal had allowed dependants who joined on one post to seek appointment on a higher one. The Karnataka High Court quashes those orders, on a rule the Supreme Court settled for exactly this situation.
Nine per cent by one assessment, a hundred per cent functionally, then AIIMS. A Delhi judgment on crash compensation shows how a disability figure turns into money, and where the Tribunal had it wrong.
A widow and her minor daughter were refused protection because the document behind their title had gone. The High Court holds possession admitted by the other side makes a prima facie case on its own.
The Patna High Court will not touch a Rs 29.23 crore demand while the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal is seised of it. It will, however, stop the recovery until somebody decides the interim application.
