The Supreme Court on Tuesday imposed a penalty of ₹ 3 lakh on former IPS officer, Mr. Sanjay Bhatt for repeatedly filing petitions which were related to the drug planting case against him.
The bench of justices Vikram Nath and Rajesh Bindal said that Mr. Bhatt has been repeatedly filing petitions related to the drug planting case against him, to which a penalty ₹ 1 lakh each for the three pleas was imposed on him.
Justice Vikram Nath while imposing the penalty and dismissing the multiple pleas by Mr. Bhatt, asked him the number of times he has been to the Supreme Court regarding the same plea even after Justice Gavai imposed a fine of ₹ 10 thousand the last time and now it shall be 6 figures. Justice Vikram Nath also called Justice Gavai kind for the fine they imposed.
Pleas in Supreme Court
The bench was hearing his appeal against the ruling of a court in Gujrat on August 24 this year for rejecting his application to raise concern about the fairness of the trial in relation to the drug planting case. Justice Samir Dave rejected his plea to transfer the trial and refused to stay the trial proceedings for a month.
The application that Mr. Bhatt filed was to challenge the court’s decision towards the rejection of the three applications. Amongst these applications included pleas to allow him access to video conferences to trial court proceedings and to rectify certain remarks made by the trial court in an interim order.
Mr. Bhatt has claimed that the applications were rejected because they were dealt with while dismissing the pleas to transfer court trial proceedings. He has also expressed his concerns about the impartial trial, which was conducted by contending that the trial judge had been accommodating disingenuous devilments by the prosecution and had been actively jeopardizing the defense’s case and rights in the NDPS case or the Narcotics, Drugs, and Psychotropic Substances Act.
The bench also heard the plea by Mr. Bhatt, seeking audio and video recordings of the trial proceedings which senior advocate Devadatt Kamat has argued that it was a simple request and was not a crime.
However, the court said that Mr. Bhatt has been regularly filing applications to the top court and would have to pay the sum of ₹ 1 lakh each for the three pleas.
The NDPS Case
The case itself arose when a Rajasthan-based lawyer was arrested in 1996 by the Basankantha Police after drugs were seized from the hotel room of the advocate’s hotel room in Palanpur, Rajasthan. Mr. Bhatt at that time, was the Superintendent of Police at Basankantha.
However, later the Rajasthan Police claimed that Mr. Bhatt’s team had lodged a fake case which was done to harass the lawyer in regards to a property dispute.
Mr. Bhatt was later arrested in September 2018 and has been in jail since then. In February 2023 the Supreme Court dismissed the plea filed by him after terming it as ‘frivolous’ and imposed a fine of ₹10, 000 on Bhatt.
He was later dismissed from service by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs in 2015 on grounds of unauthorized absence from the service.
