‘Overburdened’ Bombay HC adjourns hearing on death confirmation pleas of 7/11 train blast convicts

After a trial of over eight years, a special court under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crimes Act (MCOCA) in October, 2015 had awarded death penalty to five accused and life terms to seven others.

Thereafter, the Maharashtra government approached the HC seeking the confirmation of death row granted to the five convicts; the latter, too, filed appeals challenging their convictions.

On Monday, special counsel and senior advocate Raja Thakare told a bench of Justice R D Dhanuka and Justice M G Sewlikar that the hearing on confirmation pleas would take at least five to six months as there were 92 prosecution witnesses and over 50 defence witnesses. Evidence in the case ran over 169 volumes and judgments of death sentence went into nearly 2,000 pages.

The bench, which had been assigned to hear the pleas, then asked advocate Aditya Mehta, lawyer for one of the convicts who had filed an appeal, to approach Chief Justice Dipankar Datta seeking assignment of another bench, as the current bench was “overburdened”.

Senior advocate Thakare responded that the confirmation pleas earlier came up before three benches, including former judges Justices Naresh Patil, B P Dharmadhikari and S S Jadhav, and that the hearings could not take place since the judges were due to retire.

The lawyers informed the bench led by Justice Dhanuka that they had already sought assignment of special bench and that is how the present bench was assigned. “Yes, but we are already overloaded. I will simply place this matter for hearing in August for directions and final hearing,” Justice Dhanuka said.

The remarks came on a day Justice Anil K Menon of the Bombay HC is retiring due to superannuation, leaving the total strength of the court to 54 judges.

Justice Menon is the sixth judge of the Bombay HC to retire this year. Four more judges are due for superannuation in the next few months.

With appointments of 10 lawyers as judges due for clearance from the central government, the Bombay HC, which has a principal seat in Mumbai and benches in Aurangabad, Nagpur and Goa, will function with 54 judges from Tuesday, which includes 45 permanent judges and nine additional judges. However, the sanctioned strength of the court, second largest in the country after Allahabad High Court, is 94.

Due to the upcoming retirements, the strength is likely to come down if the appointments recommended by Supreme Court (SC) collegium are not made by the central government.

Referring to the issue of overburdened judges of the Bombay HC, Chief Justice Dipankar Datta, who presided over a ceremonial bench with Justice Menon on his last day on Monday, remarked: “All I can say is, he (Justice Menon) is leaving us in difficult times…”