The right of appeal against an acquittal vested in the Crown should be used sparingly and with circumspection

Venkatasubba Rao, J.

1. It is an accepted maxim that the right of appeal against an acquittal vested in the Crown should be used sparingly and with circumspection. In the present case, if the Sessions Judge, instead of acquitting the accused, had imposed upon him a nominal fine the requirements of the law would have been satisfied. But on this purely technical ground this appeal should not have been filed. The observations of the learned Judge are no doubt strong but by no means stronger than the facts warrant. I say nothing regarding the conviction of the thief himself, but this prosecution, there can be no doubt, was ill conceived. Suppose a man is being tried on a capital charge and his wife is forced into the witness box by the Crown, is she to take her trial for perjury on the score that, in screening her husband she has given false evidence? Perjury is a concomitant of a Court of law, the question always being one of degree. Every act of perjury is, in strict law, an offence but it does not follow, that on that account every perjurer should be charged. The police, I should have expected, would have profited by the remarks of the lower Court, which in my opinion, were pertinent and rightly made. The Governments position is different from that of a private party and this appeal, as I have said, should never have been filed, and it is dismissed.