Judge needn't face strictures for typos in judgement: SC

NEW DELHI: Some factual errors in a judgement delivered by her, allegedly due to a 'cut, copy and paste' job, had cost a trial judge dear, resulting in Rajasthan HC castigating her and sending her to a judicial academy for training. But Supreme Court has come to the judge's rescue and struck off the adverse observations against her, holding that criticising a judicial officer for inadvertent typographical errors in a judgement, which did not affect the outcome of the case, was unwarranted. A bench of Justices Sandeep Mehta and Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya allowed the plea of the judge and expunged the strictures and adverse remarks against her. "Ex facie, we feel that the adverse observations and the strictures recorded by HC against the judicial officer were uncalled for and avoidable. These disparaging remarks and the strictures were recorded on the judicial side without affording an opportunity to the judicial officer to show-cause or to place her explanation on record before such observations and strictures were made, and hence, suffer from the vice of nonadherence to the principles of natural justice," it said.

HC observed the judicial officer "had used the methodology of 'cut, copy and paste' and in all probability, the judgement had been scripted by the stenographer/clerk concerned and was signed without being read and corrected by the presiding officer as she failed to strike out the irrelevant paragraphs which related to the trial of the adult accused". The trial judge had passed two judgements arising out of the same case as one of the accused was a minor. After appreciating the evidence in both trials, the judicial officer pronounced separate judgements convicting both the accused of the charges against them and sentencing each to 20 years' RI. SC said it seemed that during the course of rendering judgements in the two cases, some extracts of evidence/numerical details from one trial were inadvertently incorporated into the judgement for the other.