The Madras High Court has directed State Public Prosecutor Hasan Mohamed Jinnah to coordinate with the Director-General of Police (DGP) and ensure that only police personnel with sufficient knowledge about individual cases are sent to court when those cases are heard, in order to provide effective assistance to the prosecution.
Justice A.D. Jagadish Chandira disapproved the practice of police personnel, with hardly any knowledge about a case being sent to the courts to give instructions to the prosecutors. He said, such a practice led to the waste of precious time of the court as these policemen do not end up providing any kind of assistance in disposing of the matter.
Passing interim orders on a bail petition, the judge wrote: “When the matter was taken up today, the police personnel, who was deputed by the investigating agency to be present in the court hall to furnish information in this case to the public prosecutor, was fumbling and stumbling without proper information and thereby disrupting the hearing of cases.”
Stating that he had encountered similar situations many a time and even expressed his displeasure over this ”casual and lethargic” attitude of the police department, the judge said, he was constrained to put it in writing this time because there was no change despite as many as 200 bail petitions getting listed before the court every day.
The judge directed the State PP to take up the issue with the DGP so that the police personnel deputed to give instructions to the prosecutors come prepared with the facts of the case concerned.
