On the day it set 3-month deadline for high courts, Supreme Court gave verdict reserved for 15 months

NEW DELHI On the very day (Friday, May 29) Supreme Court laid down mandatory guidelines for high courts to pronounce judgments within three months of reserving them, an SC bench pronounced its verdict in a 42-year-old double murder case from Delhi after keeping it reserved for 15 months.

Two bodies were discovered within a span of three days in July 1984 at Civil Lines and Alipur, identified as the driver and helper of a truck. Suspects were arrested by Delhi Police within a fortnight of discovery of the bodies and were accused of murdering the driver and helper to steal their truck.

Trials in the two cases lodged at police stations in Civil Lines and Alipur were clubbed together only in 2008, and the sessions court convicted the accused of murder and awarded them life imprisonment in 2009. Their appeals were dismissed by the Delhi high court in 2013. One of the convicts, Gopi Chand, aka Pappu, appealed against the conviction and life term before SC in 2013.

A bench of Justices P S Narasimha and Manoj Misra heard the final arguments in the case on February 27 last year and reserved its verdict.

The judgment remained pending with Justice Misra for 15 months.

Delivering a judgment on Friday after keeping it reserved for 15 months, Justice Manoj Misra said prosecution has succeeded in establishing that five persons had conspired to steal the truck by first hiring it and then murdering the driver and the helper. "We therefore uphold the conviction of the appellant for the offences for which he has been convicted by the trial court and the HC," the bench said.

However, it commuted the life sentence to 18 years of jail term already served by the convict.

On April 12, TOI had reported how Justice Misra had delivered verdicts in two cases after reserving the judgment for 17 and 11 months.

In another case, he delivered a verdict in Feb this year after keeping it reserved for 14 months.

On Friday, the CJI Surya Kant-led bench, while fixing a timeline for expeditious pronouncement of reserved verdicts by HCs, had said, "The right to life and personal liberty guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution is not confined to the expeditious conduct of a trial."