Irritated By Hundreds Of Faulty Petitions, Mumbai High Court Asks Police To Learn Grammar

Around time policemen revised usage of punctuation and learnt to tell those pronouns apart from verbs. For the Bombay high court recently admonished policemen who insist on filing affidavits on their own, that the legal documents are riddled with grammatical and legal bloopers.

Chiding the police, a division bench of Justice S C Dharmadhikari and Justice G S Kulkarni, told the men in khaki that their familiarity with the law is not enough to represent matters in court. This came up in a recent case about the detention of a 21-year-old Solapur resident. The judges said: "Apart from bad grammar and several errors of language, the authority has filed an affidavit full of mistakes and it is reported that the authorities insist that they need not be corrected."

Reuters

The court expressed displeasure when told by additional public prosecutor Jayesh Yagnik that police officers insist that they themselves would frame the affidavit and it must be filed by prosecutors without changes.

The high court said: "Ultimately, appearance in a court of law requires a blend of expertise, experience in arguing and presenting rival viewpoints. That function and duty be best left to be performed by advocates (officers of the court and perform a public duty)." The court said that when mistakes by the police and error-ridden affidavits result in release of the accused, there are consequences that follow.

"If the errors and mistakes are basic and fundamental, incapable of being ignored or overlooked, then depending upon other circumstances, a conclusion can be reached by the court that this is an attempt to somehow assist the detenue in securing a release order. A deliberate or intentional act of this nature, leaving the court no alternative but to release the detenue can never go unnoticed or uncommented."

The court asked government and senior police officials to tell subordinates to curtail their enthusiasm and not insist on filing affidavits without changes by prosecutors. The police must submit facts or a draft to the prosecutor, who will finalise it to be filed before the court, the court said.

"Their over-anxiety and undue enthusiasm should not spoil the matters and cases of the state," the judges observed while ordering the release of the youth who had been ordered to be detained by the Solapur police.

(Originally published in The Times of India | Image for representation purpose only)