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quashes police notices against over patient death
The has quashed eight notices issued by the to and its senior consultant gynaecologist, Dr. Vinuta B, ruling that an under an cannot be converted into a full-fledged in the absence of a registered .
Justice M. Nagaprasanna, presiding over the , held that the investigating agency had blurred the well-settled between an under — corresponding to the erstwhile — and an investigation pursuant to the registration of a .
A Routine Procedure That Turned Tragic
The controversy traces back to , when Spoorthi Chithriki, a 29-year-old woman, was admitted to 's Doddakallasandra facility for a routine hysteroscopic polypectomy. During the procedure, an unforeseen intra-operative complication arose, prompting the entire surgical team to initiate resuscitative measures. Despite their efforts, the patient's condition deteriorated, and she was shifted to , where she subsequently passed away.
The hospital informed the jurisdictional station the same day, leading to the registration of UDR No. 33/2026 under . The bereaved husband also lodged a complaint, setting the investigative machinery in motion.
A Stream of Notices Despite Full Cooperation
From the outset, the hospital claims to have extended complete cooperation. The first notice was answered immediately, with all requested documents furnished the same day. Subsequent notices seeking CCTV footage and original patient records were likewise complied with. A conducted on May 26 led to the hospital handing over 36 sheets of inpatient records and a 64 GB pen drive containing CCTV footage.
On June 4, the police demanded the complete video recording of the surgical procedure. The hospital furnished the entire unedited video, spanning 36 minutes and 22 seconds, without withholding a single frame. Certified copies of inpatient records were also supplied at the husband's request on June 10.
Despite this, three further notices were issued on June 23 under — one demanding the unedited hysteroscopy video and physical production of the digital operation theatre equipment, another requiring the very machine used in the surgery, and a third summoning Dr. Vinuta for recording of evidence. The court noted that ten women members of the hospital staff had also been issued notices under , directing them to appear before the police station.
Petitioners' Submissions: No for Police
, counsel for the petitioners, contended that the law does not grant a to investigating officers to interfere with and harass doctors over an incident beyond their control. She argued that the object of a UDR is to ascertain the circumstances surrounding death, not to subject every person remotely connected with the treatment to needless inconvenience. She pointed out that the complainant had already approached the , the statutory body specifically empowered to examine allegations of , and that the police were merely acting as an extended arm of a disciplinary authority.
State's Counter: Need to Ascertain Cause of Death
, State Public Prosecutor, defended the police action, arguing that the cause of death had not been fully revealed by the hospital and that the police were legitimately enquiring into an unnatural death. He maintained that no harassment had occurred and that every enquiry into a hospital could not be characterised as harassment.
The : Versus Investigation
The court's analysis centred on the limited scope of Section 194 BNSS. Citing a trilogy of judgments —
Manoj Kumar Sharma v. State of Chhattisgarh
(2016),
Rhea Chakraborty v. State of Bihar
(2020), and
Amit Kumar v. Union of India
(2025) — Justice Nagaprasanna emphasised that proceedings under (now Section 194 BNSS) are confined to ascertaining the apparent cause of death. As the Apex Court held in
Manoj Kumar Sharma
,
"the question regarding the details as to how the deceased was assaulted or who assaulted him or under what circumstances he was assaulted is foreign to the ambit and scope of the proceedings under Section 174."
The court also examined the operator's manual of the anaesthesia machine, which revealed that trend data is retained only for twenty-four hours before being automatically overwritten — undermining the police's insistence on production of logs that, by design, no longer exist.
Key Observations
"The police cannot, under the guise of conducting an , embark upon a or assume powers that become available only after an sets the criminal law in motion, a caveat it would depend upon facts and circumstances of each case."
" , however important, cannot be permitted to assume proportions that disable a functioning healthcare institution from discharging its primary obligation towards society."
"Every unfortunate medical outcome cannot, by itself, become the genesis of criminal suspicion. Equally, every doctor who participated in the treatment cannot be permitted to be drawn into the merely because the treatment culminated in an adverse consequence."
Decision
Allowing the , the court quashed all eight notices — those dated May 20, May 21, June 4, June 19, and , as well as the three notices issued on . The court clarified that its observations are confined solely to the UDR and will not bind or influence proceedings before the , which remains at liberty to independently examine the complaint within its statutory jurisdiction.
The ruling reinforces the critical distinction between an into an unnatural death and a — a distinction the court noted the Apex Court has "repeatedly and emphatically preserved." For hospitals and medical professionals, the judgment offers significant protection against in the absence of a registered .
