IMPORTANT POINT
The court clarified that under Section 207 Cr.P.C., only documents relied upon by the prosecution must be provided to the accused, while unrelied upon documents can be requested later under Section 91.

JUDGMENT :

Manjari Nehru Kaul, J.

CRM No.17628 of 2024

In view of the averments made in the application and in the interest of justice, the same is allowed as prayed for, subject to all just exceptions. The rejoinder of the petitioner to the reply filed on behalf of the respondent/CBI along with supporting documents (Annexures P-15 to P-18A-C) are taken on record.

CRM-M No.18316 of 2024

1. The petitioner, in the instant petition, filed under Section 482 Cr.P.C., is seeking quashing of order dated 06.04.2024 (Annexure P-2) passed by the Court of learned Special Judge, CBI, Chandigarh vide which her application under Section 207 of the Cr.P.C. was dismissed.

2. It has been contended by the learned senior counsel that documents listed at Sr.No.6(a) and 6(b) of seizure memo (D/5) annexed at Annexure P-5 be supplied to the petitioner inter alia on the following grounds:

(i) That the CBI has relied on seizure memo (annexed as Annexure P-5) in both its reports filed under Section 173(2) and 173(8) of the Cr.P.C. Despite this, the CBI is now claiming that certain documents which form part of the seizure memo, are ‘unrelied upon’ documents since they are not a part of the challan. Rather, a perusal of the seizure memo clearly reveals that it contains ten items in total, from Sr.No. ‘a’ to ‘j’, and the entire seizure memo has been relied upon by the CBI in its report under Section 173(8) Cr.P.C., without making any distinction qua the documents, which now as per the CBI are ‘unrelied upon documents’. In support, attention of this Court has been drawn to Sr. No. 5 of the Charge Sheet, annexed as Annexure P-2;

(ii) that this bifurcation which has been drawn for the first time is only an excuse to deny the supply of documents to the petitioner, even though she is legally entitled to the same; further the reasoning now being given by the CBI that at Sr. No. 5 of Annexure P-2 (in the reply filed by the CBI, i.e. charge-sheet) only specifically listed documents in the column were being relied upon, i.e. from Sr. No.(i) to (iv), is totally contrary to the material on record; no doubt, the CBI has listed only four documents in this column, however, the seizure memo clearly shows that in fact, it contains a total of ten documents;

(iii) that the petitioner has already been provided with 08 out of the 10 documents mentioned in the seizure memo, which documents, are in addition to those being claimed as ‘relied upon’ by the CBI in its charge-sheet filed against the accused before the learned CBI Court. Hence, it is evident that the entire seizure memo is being relied upon by the CBI, or else why would they have unhesitatingly supplied the allegedly ‘unrelied upon documents’ to the petitioner and the mother of the deceased;

(iv) that no doubt, there is a statutory restriction on supplying copies of case diaries/police file to the accused under the Cr.P.C., however, this restriction would not apply in the present case as the case diaries pertain to the initial investigation carried out by the Chandigarh Police. Thereafter, the Chandigarh police had no role to play as the investigation was transferred to the CBI, who then presented the final reports under Sections 173(2) and 173(8) Cr.P.C. In case these diaries were supplied to the petitioner, it would not cause any prejudice to the prosecution, as they did not pertain to the investigation carried out by the CBI, but only to the initial investigation carried out by the Chandigarh Police;

(v) that while referring to the contents of paragraph 16.80 in the untraced report (Annexure P-15) filed by the CBI, attention of this Court has been drawn to certain lapses, (e.g. destruction of evidence), committed by then SHO namely Poonam Dilawari and ASP Chandigarh Police Guriqbal Singh Sidhu, which had seriously ‘handicapped’ the progress of investigation, and for which a major penalty had also been recommended against them; thus, to ascertain whether the investigation was botched up initially as claimed by the CBI, it co