He served the sentence and came anyway to clear his name. The Supreme Court finds the bribery charge was never proved
Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and Atul S. Chandurkar set aside concurrent convictions under the Prevention of Corruption Act, holding that not one trap witness saw the demand or the money change hands.
An assistant in a district education office in Jharkhand was convicted of demanding Rs 5,000 to release an orderly's unpaid salary, sentenced to four years, and lost his appeal in the High Court. By the time his case reached the Supreme Court he had finished the imprisonment and paid the fine. He pursued the appeal anyway, his counsel told the Court, because he wanted his name cleared. He now has it: Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and Atul S. Chandurkar have set aside both judgments, holding that the prosecution proved neither the demand nor the acceptance, and that what it had instead was the uncorroborated word of the complainant.
A salary that was not paid
The prosecution case begins in February 2010, when the complainant was appointed to the post of orderly at a government high school and his salary was not released. He approached the appellant, an assistant in the District Education Office at Saraikella, and the appellant is said to have demanded Rs 5,000 as a bribe to get the salary released.
The complainant did not want to pay. On 19 April 2010 he submitted an application to the Superintendent of Police, Vigilance Bureau, at Ranchi. A police inspector was deputed to verify the complaint and submit a report. He submitted it on 19 May 2010, stating that the allegations were true, and a vigilance case was registered under Sections 7 and 13(2) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988.
The trap was laid on 20 May 2010. The Special Judge, Anti-Corruption Bureau, West Singhbhum at Chaibasa convicted the appellant on 27 February 2021 and sentenced him to four years' rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs 10,000 with a default stipulation on each of the two counts, the sentences to run concurrently. The High Court of Jharkhand at Ranchi affirmed that on 21 July 2022.
When the Supreme Court issued notice in July 2026, counsel for the appellant placed on record that his client had already undergone the sentence and paid the fine, and wished to pursue the petition only to clear his name. Leave was granted in September and judgment reserved.
What the trap team actually said
The judgment goes witness by witness, and the picture that emerges from the prosecution's own evidence is the heart of the case.
A constable who was part of the trap team deposed that the accused was arrested in his office after the complainant signalled that the money had been paid. In cross-examination he accepted that the complainant did not hand the money to the accused in his presence; that although the accused was caught in his office, no money was recovered from him there; that he could not remember who searched the accused; and that the seizure list did not carry his signature.
An assistant sub-inspector on the same team gave a different sequence. On his account the complainant and the accused came out of the office together and left on a motorcycle. The trap team followed in a vehicle, but the motorcycle went ahead, and the two men returned to the office. Only afterwards did the complainant disclose that he had paid. The team then took the accused to his residence, where he brought the money out from under his pillow, and his fingers turned the solution pink.
Two independent witnesses were drawn from the accused's own office, and their evidence is the most damaging to the prosecution.
The head clerk accompanied the vigilance team to the residence but remained outside while the team went in. In cross-examination he said that nothing was shown to him, that he had no knowledge of which thing was brought from where, and that he had simply put his signature on some documents on the direction of the vigilance officials, who told him money had been recovered from the house.
A clerk from the same office said much the same. He was told by the vigilance officials to sign certain papers and did so without being aware of their contents. He had come out of his office because of the commotion when the officials seized the accused. He could not say what happened inside the house. He did not see any money. His deposition that currency notes were recovered from the residence, he admitted, was made on the direction of the police.
Two versions of one arrest, and one thing common to both
Analysing that evidence, the Court first dealt with the delay. The complaint was lodged on 19 April and the verification report filed only on 19 May. The inspector explained the gap by saying the complainant could not immediately arrange the bribe money — an explanation the Court noted had nothing to do with the truthfulness or otherwise of the complaint, which is a fair way of saying it neither helped nor hurt.
On the trap itself the judgment records that there are inconsistencies galore in the narration of facts, and then picks out the one it calls startling. When the complainant offered to pay the money in the accused's office, the two of them left for the accused's residence, where the money is alleged to have been handed over. On the version of some witnesses the accused was apprehended at his residence; on the version of others, the two returned to the office, the complainant signalled that he had paid, the vigilance team barged into the office and seized him there, and he was then taken to his residence, from where the money was allegedly recovered from under his pillow.
The Bench declined to get bogged down in reconciling those accounts, because one feature is uniform across all of them. None of the witnesses saw the accused demand a bribe. None saw the complainant hand over the money. There is no evidence in that regard at all — only the uncorroborated testimony of the complainant himself. And a couple of witnesses went so far as to say they had signed the seizure list because the vigilance officials directed them to.
Why proof of demand decides these cases
The legal proposition the Court applied is settled, and the judgment sets out the line of authority behind it.
In P. Satyanarayana Murthy v. State of A.P. the Supreme Court held that proof of the demand of illegal gratification is the sine qua non of an offence under Sections 7 and 13 of the Act, and that in its absence the charge must fail. The passage quoted in this judgment puts it in terms that leave no room: the proof of demand is the gravamen of the offence; mere acceptance of an amount by way of illegal gratification, or its recovery, divorced from proof of demand, is not sufficient to bring home the charge; failure to prove the demand is fatal, and mere recovery of the amount from the accused will not entail conviction.
The same ground was covered by a Constitution Bench in Neeraj Dutta v. State (Government of NCT of Delhi), which declared that proof of demand and acceptance of illegal gratification by a public servant, as a fact in issue, is a sine qua non for establishing guilt under Sections 7 and 13(1)(d)(i) and (ii). To bring home the guilt of an accused the prosecution must first prove the demand and the subsequent acceptance as a matter of fact — a fact in issue that can be proved by direct evidence, oral or documentary.
That last point matters for how these cases are run. Neeraj Dutta did not require an eyewitness; the Constitution Bench accepted that demand can also be established circumstantially where direct evidence is unavailable. What it did not accept is that the fact can be skipped. The prosecution here led no direct evidence of demand and offered no circumstantial case for it either, resting instead on what was found after the event.
A two-Judge Bench in Aman Bhatia v. State surveyed the law and reached the conclusion that applies most directly to this record: mere recovery of tainted money is by itself insufficient to establish a charge under the Act, and to sustain a conviction under Sections 7 and 13 the prosecution must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the public servant voluntarily accepted the money knowing it to be a bribe. Voluntary acceptance with knowledge is a state of mind, and on this evidence there was nobody to speak to it.
The Court then turned to Jaswinder Singh v. State of Punjab, a recent decision authored by Justice Bhuyan himself, in which all those authorities were analysed and reiterated, and in which the facts were close to these: no one saw the appellant make the demand, no one saw the complainant hand the money over, and no one saw the appellant accept it.
Applied here, the conclusion was short. Proof of demand and acceptance of illegal gratification by the accused, as a fact in issue, could not be proved by the prosecution. That being so, it could not be said that the charge under Sections 7 and 13 was proved — the judgment adds, pointedly, “not to speak of beyond all reasonable doubt”.
Order
The Court set aside the judgment of the Special Judge of February 2021 and the judgment of the High Court of July 2022. It declared that the charge framed against the appellant under Sections 7 and 13 of the Prevention of Corruption Act could not be proved, and that he is cleared of those charges. The appeal was allowed.
The relief is declaratory and nothing else, because there was no sentence left to set aside — the imprisonment had been served and the fine paid long before the matter was heard. That is worth sitting with. A man convicted in 2021 on a trap laid in 2010 completed four years' rigorous imprisonment while his appeal moved through the system, and the finding now is not that the case against him was weak but that the offence was never established at all.
The timeline is its own comment. The trap was laid in May 2010 and the Special Judge convicted in February 2021 — close to eleven years for a case resting on a single day's operation and ten witnesses. The High Court affirmed in July 2022, and the Supreme Court issued notice in July 2026. Sixteen years separate the trap from the finding that the offence was never established. The appellant's decision to carry on after his sentence was over is what made the finding possible at all; had he let the matter rest when he walked out of prison, the conviction would have stood on the record as a proved charge of corruption, with whatever that costs a man who worked in a government office.
What the judgment does not do is announce new law. Satyanarayana Murthy is from 2015 and Neeraj Dutta is a Constitution Bench; the requirement that demand be proved has been the governing rule throughout the life of this prosecution. The interest lies in how an unproved demand nonetheless produced concurrent convictions in two courts. On the Supreme Court's reading the trial proceeded on recovery and on the phenolphthalein test — the money produced from under a pillow, the fingers turning pink — which establish that currency was found and handled, and say nothing about whether it was asked for.
The pink solution is a good illustration of the gap. A phenolphthalein test shows that the hands which handled the treated notes were the accused's. It cannot show how the notes came to be handled, whether they were asked for, or whether the man who touched them knew what they were — which is precisely the knowledge Aman Bhatia requires the prosecution to prove. The same is true of the recovery itself. On the version the trial court accepted, the money came out from under a pillow in the accused's own house, after he was taken there by the trap team; on another version in the same record he was seized at his residence rather than brought to it. Neither account puts a witness in the room when the money changed hands.
There is a further oddity the judgment flags without resolving. The whole point of a trap is that the payment happens under observation. Here the complainant and the accused left the office together on a motorcycle, the trap team lost them, and the two returned before the complainant gave his signal. Whatever occurred in between occurred unwatched. A trap that loses sight of its subject at the decisive moment has not recorded a transaction; it has recorded a departure and a return, with the complainant's account filling the space between them.
The two office colleagues are the part of this record that will trouble anyone who reads it. Independent witnesses exist in trap cases precisely so that a court is not left with the complainant's word against the accused's. Here both said in cross-examination that they saw nothing, knew nothing of what was taken from where, and signed what they were told to sign; one said in terms that his evidence about the recovery of currency notes was given at the direction of the police. Evidence gathered that way does not corroborate a complainant. It leaves him alone, which is where the Court found him.