Allahabad High Court: Sanjay Kumar Pachori, J., while addressing a matter with regard to recalling of the witnesses expressed that, Section 311 of the Code confers a wide discretion on the Court to act as the exigencies of justice require.

Present application was filed under Section 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure was filed to quash the impugned order passed by the Additional Sessions Judge arising out of crime registered under Section 307 of the Penal Code, 1860, by which two applications filed by the applicant/accused under Section 311 of the Code have been rejected.

Analysis, Law and Discussion

High Court noted that trial Court by its order dismissed the applications for recalling the witnesses for further cross-examination and rejected the submission urged on behalf of the applicant on the ground that the defence had elaborately cross-examined.

If there is any contradiction or ambiguity in the prosecution evidence. It is a settled position of law that the accused would be entitled to benefit of the doubt.

Trial Court’s order had been assailed on two grounds:

  • After reading the evidence of PW-1 and PW-2 the identity of scribe Suresh Singh was not clear.
  • If the complaint had been written by Suresh Singh, son of Rama Shankar who died about one year before the incident, in that case, the genesis of the prosecution case would be proved false.

Section 311 is manifestly in two parts, the first part of the Section has given discretion to the Court and enables it any stage of an inquiry, trial, or other proceedings under the Code, (a) to summon anyone as a witness, or (b) to examine any person in the Court, or (c) to recall and re-examine any person whose evidence has already been recorded; on the other hand, the second part of the Section is mandatory and imposes an obligation on the Court, to do one of aforesaid three things if the new evidence appears to it essential to the just decision of the case.

Further, the Court observed that, Section 311 of the Code gave wide power to the Court to summon a material witness or to examine a person present on Court or to recall a witness already examined.

The said Section confers a wide discretion on the court to act as the exigencies of justice require.

The discretion given by the first part is very wide and its very width requires a corresponding caution on the part of the court. But the second part does not allow any discretion; it binds the court to examine fresh evidence and the only condition prescribed is that this evidence must be essential to the just decision of the case. Whether the new evidence is essential or not must of course depend on the facts of each case and has to be determined by the presiding Judge [Ram Jeet v. State of U.P., AIR 1958 All 439]

In the present matter, Bench observed that, PW-1 is not an eyewitness of the incident, the FIR had been lodged by PW-1 after about 46 hours of the incident on the basis of information received from PW-2.

The application for recalling PW-1 had been filed after about 4 years of recording the statement-in-chief of the PW1 and another application for recalling PW-5 filed after about one year of recording the examination-in-chief of PW-5.

In Court’s opinion, the trial judge gave well-founded reasons for rejecting the applications.

Hence, the impugned order passed by the trial court was affirmed and the present application under Section 311 of the Code was dismissed.[Bheem Singh v. State of U.P., 2022 SCC OnLine All 40, decided on 18-1-2022]


Advocates before the Court:

Counsel for the Applicant: Neeraj Pandey, Om Prakash Singh Sikarwar

Counsel for the OP: G.A.

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