Telangana High Court on Feb. 6 dismissed a batch of six writ appeals filed by State Government questioning a single judge order directing the CBI to investigate into the case of attempt to poach four BRS MLAs.
The Bench of Chief Justice Ujjal Bhuyan and Justice N. Tukaramji pronounced judgment in all the six appeal pleas declaring them as ‘not paintable’. As the verdict was announced, Advocate General B.S. Prasad requested the Bench to stay its order facilitating the State Government to move Supreme Court for an appeal. However, the Bench turned down the AG’s prayer.
“We have no hesitation in our mind that the order passed by the single Judge was in the context of criminal subject matter and certainly in the exercise of criminal jurisdiction in the proper sense as explained by the Supreme Court in Ramakrishnan Fauji judgement,” the Bench said. The Bench observed that it had made a ‘careful and compound analysis of the averments made in all the writ appeals, writ petitions and the order passed by the single judge’.
The Bench headed by the Chief Justice noted that the single Judge upheld the rights of the three accused Ramachandra Bharathi, Nandu Kumar and Simhayaji in crime no. 455 of 2022. The single Judge was of the opinion that rights of the accused were being compromised due to leakage of investigation findings and material branding them as culprits even before the charge sheet was filed.
The single Judge order was nothing but a decision taken on criminal jurisdiction side with clause 15 of the Letter Patent Appeal, observed the Bench. “The single judge order rendered is clearly within criminal law…in our considered opinion there will be no appeals in this court,” the Bench said.
Challenging the single judge order would be clearly barred by Clause 15 of the Letter Patent Appeal and hence would not be maintainable, the Bench noted. “Hence, it is not necessary for us to go into the merits of the case,” the Division Bench said.
