Three conclusions may be drawn from the Supreme Court >ruling that the Tamil Nadu government did not have the jurisdiction to appoint a Special Public Prosecutor to handle the appeals filed by former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa. First, it reflects poorly on the State government, which displayed what the court called “anxiety” to ensure representation for the prosecution when her bail application came up for hearing immediately after her conviction in a Bengaluru Special Court in September last year. Secondly, the Tamil Nadu and Karnataka governments demonstrated inexcusable ignorance of the legal position that once a case was transferred from one State to another, the transferring State loses jurisdiction to pursue it further. This position had been underscored by the Supreme Court only a few years ago. Thirdly, the Supreme Court continues to lay emphasis on the purity of the criminal process in corruption cases and will not countenance attempts to derail the process. Fears that the disposal of the appeals made in the Karnataka High Court by Ms. Jayalalithaa and her three associates against their four-year jail term would be delayed have been allayed, as the three-judge Bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra has ruled out a de novo hearing. It has also clarified that Section 301 of the CrPC (which says a Special Prosecutor appointed for a ‘case’ may appear without written authority in any court) does not mean that a person appointed as prosecutor in a district court could also appear before a high court in the same case.
The Karnataka government has now brought back B.V. Acharya, who had earlier vigorously prosecuted the case but was >forced to resign , to represent it while filing its submissions before the High Court. It will be seen as a legal setback to Ms. Jayalalithaa mainly because she and her lawyers gave the impression that they wanted Mr. Bhavani Singh to be the prosecutor in the appellate stage too. They ought to have known that no court would allow the accused to choose the counsel for the prosecution. As a result, the court has asked the High Court to disregard Mr. Singh’s written submissions, if any. The Supreme Court’s reminder to the High Court that corruption has a “corroding effect”, that it is the duty of an appellate judge to scrutinise objectively the evidence on record in its entirety and that his reasoning ought to be “resolutely expressed”, may cause some anxiety to the defence as to whether there is any implicit direction to the High Court to decide the matter in a particular manner. However, a look at the context would show that the Supreme Court is doing no such thing. Rather, it is only reinforcing its view that want of proper assistance from one side need not affect the outcome if the appellate judge is sufficiently objective and avoids weakness and vacillation.
