The court order reminded the enforcement authorities that any accused who applied for bail in the high court is presumed innocent. File | Photo credit: Sushil Kumar Verma
The Supreme Court of India has said that the presumption of innocence in a trial is not extinguished merely because the law enforcement agency claims that his alleged offense is “serious” or if he happens to be booked under a strict law.
A bench headed by Justice JK Maheshwari marked the court’s disapproval of agencies resorting to ways of prolonging imprisonment in non-bailable trials with the “objection of making him taste imprisonment as a lesson”.
The court order reminded the enforcement authorities that any accused who applied for bail in the high court is presumed innocent. This was a basic postulate of the law, which would not vanish into thin air just because the charges were serious or the law was serious.
“Unreasonable Care”
“Pre-trial detention cannot degenerate into punishment without a court order, and courts are constitutionally bound to intervene where long-term detention becomes unreasonable, arbitrary or disproportionate,” he said.
The court said that the norm of “bail is the rule and imprisonment is the exception” was etched in the ethos of criminal jurisprudence.
“In general, an undertrial prisoner should not be placed behind bars indefinitely unless there is a clear threat to society, (possibility of) influencing witnesses/investigations, or risk of escape, etc. This rule also ensures that trial is also not a sentence whereby a person is imprisoned for many years until trial. Bail is a qualified right of the accused to be charged before sentencing is guaranteed, where the charge is not guaranteed. as to why a prisoner in court proceedings should not have been extended to bail, any deviation in the above proposal is constitutionally prudent,” the court said.
The order cited precedents which stated that “once it is clear that a timely trial will not be possible and the accused will be incarcerated for a considerable period of time, the courts would ordinarily be obliged to extend them to bail”.
The observations were part of the recent bail order against Kapil Wadhawan, CEO of Dewan Housing Finance Limited (DHFL), and his brother Dheeraj Wadhawan in connection with the ₹34,000 crore bank fraud case registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation on a complaint by Union Bank of India.
The bail set strict conditions for the brothers, including prior permission from the Supreme Court before leaving the country. The court reasoned that the trial in a case with 736 witnesses, 110 defendants and a $4 million prosecution case with records filling 17 suitcases would not be completed for at least the next two or three years.
Published – 02 Jan 2026 23:02 IST
