Tanvi Sinha
Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Arvind Bansal sought the filing status of charge sheets forwarded in the last three years by senior officers, as a way of taking strong action against Investigative Officers who don’t file charge sheets.
Non-filing of charges forwarded by a senior officer amounted to undermining the hierarchy and would shake the confidence of ordinary citizens by the delay in justice.
The court stated that no more than 30 days should be taken to file it, after the forwarding of the charge sheet by the ACP concerned.
The Magistrate also directed the ACPs concerned to prepare a list of charge sheets that have been filed within the last three years from 2018 to 2020 to check up on their status regarding filing them via IOs.
Furthermore, the court ordered ACPs to work under DCP (South east) so as to come up with a system to check the filing of charge sheets and then submit it to the court.
The situation arose when the court was hearing a 2017 case of rash driving where the ACP had forwarded the charge sheet in October 2018 but the IO had not filed it till January 2021.
The court found the situation disturbing that IO would have in fact left the charge sheet not-filed for an even longer time if the registered owner of the offending vehicle had not randomly pushed an application for an unrelated mat