Section 384

On remand from the Supreme Court, the Rajasthan High Court quashed an Anti-Corruption Bureau FIR against a police inspector and an ASI of Bikaner, holding that the recorded demand-verification conversations showed no demand or attempt to obtain an undue advantage, and that the complaint, filed by a REET-2021 cheating-case accused soon after his bail, was prima facie actuated by vengeance (paras 10-14).

The Punjab and Haryana High Court granted regular bail to a petitioner accused of conniving with a co-accused to get multiple cases registered in Punjab and Delhi on false allegations of rape to extort money (para 2). It relied on about two years and five months in custody, bail to both co-accused, offences triable by a Magistrate and only 2 of 30 witnesses examined (para 8). Before parting, it said a national-level portal of antecedents in repeated-complaint cases needed consideration (para 9).

The Rajasthan High Court quashed all proceedings arising out of a wife's FIR alleging that her husband had used drugs, medicines and black magic to make her marry him and had raped her. As she was his legally wedded wife, the rape offence was not made out under Exception 2 to Section 375 IPC, the other offences were not made out prima facie, and the FIR, lodged around three years after a voluntary registered marriage, was an abuse of process (paras 16-18).

The Rajasthan High Court struck out the words "in absence of evidence" from the acquittal of two unmarried sisters-in-law in a matrimonial cruelty case and declared them honourably acquitted (para 16). Where the prosecution has miserably failed after full consideration of its evidence, the accused can be said to be "honourably acquitted", and labels such as "benefit of doubt" or "in absence of evidence" would affect their careers (paras 13-15).

The Supreme Court cancelled the bail granted by the Karnataka High Court to seven accused, including a film actor, in a 2024 murder case (paras 2, 26). It distinguished annulment of a perverse bail order from cancellation for post-bail misconduct (para 18) and held that "An unsustainable bail order does not become valid with the mere passage of time or the subsequent behaviour of the accused" (para 20).

The Supreme Court dismissed, with costs of Rs. 1 lakh, a former Deputy Secretary's appeal against refusal of bail in a money-laundering case (paras 2, 30). The first proviso to Section 45 of the PMLA, which allows bail to a woman, is discretionary and "could not be construed as a mandatory or obligatory on the part of the Court to release them" (para 24). The Court also strongly deprecated misstatements made in the special leave petition (paras 12, 15).