In his six-year tenure as a judge of Bombay High Court, Justice Rohit B Deo had delivered many important judgments in different cases, some of which were debated. Justice Deo primarily worked as a judge on the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court and had become second senior-most judge on the bench. On July 26, while staying the operation of a Government Resolution (GR) of no punitive action against contractors of Samruddhi Expressway, Justice Deo found "formidable substance," in submissions against the GR. The GR had been empowered to cancel all punitive proceedings initiated by the revenue department related to illegal excavation of minor minerals carried out by contractors engaged in construction or execution work of Nagpur-Mumbai Samruddhi Expressway. In October, last year, while acquitting sacked Delhi University Professor G N Saibaba, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017 over alleged Maoist links, Justice Deo-headed bench had held that "every safeguard, however miniscule, legislatively provided to the accused, must be zealously protected.” The bench went on to note, “While the war against terror must be waged by the state with unwavering resolve and every legitimate weapon in the armoury must be deployed in the fight against terror, a civil democratic society can ill afford sacrificing the procedural safeguards legislatively provided, and which is an integral facet of the due process of law, at the altar of perceived peril to national security." However, the Supreme Court had later set aside the order and sent the case back to the HC to decide it afresh. In April, this year, Justice Deo's bench allowed a plea by a woman worker seeking grant of compensation after she suffered injuries in a tiger attack. The court noted that the forest authorities had casually calculated an amount of Rs. 10, 000 as compensation and had not considered the "trauma" the woman had gone through and enhanced the compensation to Rs 1 lakh. In March, this year, after the Nagpur police told a bench headed by Justice Deo that they will not take further action against a man who was summoned to record his statement after he filed a query under the Right to Information (RTI) Act related to Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the court disposed of the plea. The bench was hearing a plea filed by Lalan Kishor Singh (61), seeking to quash the notice issued to him on December 26, 2021, by the assistant police inspector (traffic) in Nagpur's MIDC. Singh had said he came to know from newspapers that the government was providing security to the Nagpur-based RSS office, which he claimed was an “unregistered NGO”. Therefore, he filed an RTI application seeking information from the state home department's public information officer on what basis was security being provided to the RSS office and how much was being spent on the same. In December, last year, a division bench headed by Justice Deo observed that while dealing with trials of rape cases, DNA testing had the capability to not only exonerate the wrongly convicted, but also to identify the guilty. The court had upheld the life sentence granted to 55-year-old man, who raped a minor girl and impregnated her and later abandoned her at a hospital when she was in labour. In May, 2020, while appreciating the overall efforts taken by Maharashtra Police in ensuring proper implementation of Covid-19 lockdown in the state, a bench of Justice Deo referred to news reports, and warned some police personnel over giving alleged unusual and humiliating punishments in the garb of enforcing lockdown. The HC was hearing a plea alleging human rights violations by some police personnel in eager to strictly enforce the prohibitory orders.
