'Unnecessary' coffee breaks of HC judges prompt Supreme Court to call for performance audit

New Delhi: High court judges taking breaks "unnecessarily" and too often found a mention in the Supreme Court on Tuesday, which called for their performance audits.

A bench of Justices Surya Kant and N Kotiswar Singh said the top court was receiving several complaints against high court judges and it was a high time to assess the expenditure on them vis-a-vis their output.

"There are some judges who work very hard but at the same time there are judges who are unnecessarily taking coffee breaks; this break or that break. What is for lunch hour? We are hearing a lot of complaints about the high court judges. This is a larger issue which needs to be looked into. What is the performance of the high court judges? How much we are spending and what is the output? It's high time we do a performance audit," Justice Kant said.

The judge's remark came on a plea of four persons, who moved the top court claiming that the Jharkhand High Court reserved its order on the criminal appeal against conviction and life sentence in 2022 but the judgement was not pronounced.

Advocate Fauzia Shakil, appearing for them, said after the top court's nudge in the matter, the high court on May 5 and 6 pronounced the verdicts in their cases in which three of the four were acquitted while the remaining resulted in a split verdict and the matter was referred to the high court chief justice and he was granted bail.

This morning, Shakil pointed out that despite the pronouncement of the verdicts by the high court a week ago, the acquitted three persons were not released from jail and in the judgements, the high court did not mention the date of reserving the orders.

Taking exception, the bench asked the Jharkhand government counsel to immediately release them before the lunch break and posted the matter post 2 pm.

When the matter came up for hearing, the state counsel informed the bench that the convicts were released and it was due to the non-availability of release orders from the trial courts that delayed the process.

Shakil said it was due to the apex court that the four of them were "breathing fresh air" and had the high court delivered the verdicts on time, they would have been out of jail three years ago.

Justice Kant referred to it as a judge's duty and said, "We feel sorry for the suffering of these persons that due to the judicial system they had to remain in jail for such a long time." Hopefully in this case, the court will be "frank and blunt" to deal with the issue of the output of judges as it also relates to personal liberty, he added.

The bench's order observed petitioners Pila Pahan, Soma Badang, Satyanarayan Sahu were convicted of murder and other charges by the trial court and later acquitted by the high courts, and in the case of Dharmeshwar Oraon who was convicted for the offence of rape, there was a split verdict but he was released on bail.

All four persons belong to SC/ST or OBC.

The top court said the issue raised in the case was of "paramount importance" and "goes to the root of the criminal justice system".

It tagged the plea with a similar case related to Allahabad high court where information was sought on the date of pronouncement of the judgement and the date when the judgement was uploaded on the apex court website.

"It seems to us that the issues noticed in above mentioned orders would require a deeper analysis and mandatory guidelines by this court, so that convicts or undertrials aren't compelled to loose the trust and faith in the justice delivery system," the bench said. The timeline prescribed earlier by this court for pronouncement of judgements, it said, will have to be adhered to along with mechanism which this court will propose.

The bench directed the registry to collate data from high courts and posted the matter in July.