The Supreme Court on Monday directed Patna High Court to drop disciplinary proceedings against a suspended additional sessions judge from Bihar’s Araria for deciding a Pocso case and a murder case in just one and four days, respectively.

A bench of Justices U.U. Lalit and S. Ravindra Bhat asked advocate Gaurav Agarwal, appearing for the high court, to convey the top court’s feeling that “our sincere

advice is to drop everything against this man. Otherwise, if you don’t want to, we will go threadbare into the issue”.

“Ultimately this is a matter of the institution as anything you say against a judicial officer reflects on the institution. It has serious ramifications as the message that goes out is that efficiency is being punished,” the bench added.

The bench felt that Araria additional sessions judge Shashi Kant Rai was merely doing his duty and his suspension would send a wrong message and demoralise other judicial officers who were efficient.

“We feel that there should not be overzealousness to punish as it would send a bad message to other judicial officers who are efficient in their conduct,” Justice Lalit, heading the bench, told Agarwal.

“This (disciplinary action of suspension) is extremely unfair against him,” the bench remarked while noting that there were no allegations of corruption against Rai.

“It is not a healthy idea. If the order passed by a judicial officer is the subject matter of your proceedings, you can call him and the judge can be counselled before passing appraisal order or else it becomes unfair for him,” Justice Lalit observed.

Rai shot into limelight last year when he conducted a trial in a single day and sentenced an accused to life imprisonment for the rape of a child under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.

In another case, Rai had awarded death penalty to a murder-accused after concluding the trial in just four days.

At the last hearing, the court had ticked off the judge for awarding the sentence on the same day of the conviction despite a catena of apex court judgments maintaining that the two should be on separate dates.

According to the Code of Criminal Procedure and a catena of judgments, it is a fundamental principle of jurisprudence that when an accused is convicted, the quantum of sentence is awarded either the next day or after a few days so that the accused can plead mitigating circumstances in support of a lenient punishment.

However, during Monday’s hearing, the apex court bench took the view that although the judge might have shown undue haste in dealing with heinous crimes, yet suspending him would send a bad message to other judicial officers who too were keen on expediting trials.

The court also gave liberty to Rai, who was represented by senior advocate Vikas Singh, to file his defence before the high court on or before August 15 and posted the matter for further hearing to August 18 by when Patna High Court was expected to respond to the bench’s request for dropping the proceedings altogether.