LAHORE: The Supreme Court on Friday took notice of an unnecessarily lengthy order passed by a Lahore High Court judge in a bail matter and laid down a shorter format to decide an application for bail by all courts.
A two-judge bench of the apex court also converted the petition into an appeal against the order of the high court in favour of the petitioner in a murder case and released him on bail. The bench comprised Justice Mian Saqib Nisar and Justice Asif Saeed Khan Khosa.
The judgment handed down by Justice Khosa at Supreme Court’s Lahore registry drew an analogy between judicial decision-making and cricket, discussing the role of a cricket umpire and a judge.
It said cricket and judicial decision-making might not have much in common except that there was an umpire in cricket deciding ‘appeals’ and judging various issues arising during the match and there might be some judges sitting in courts who might sometimes be tempted to hit the ball over the boundary rope.
Justice Khosa said likeness of a judge to an umpire in cricket had already been alluded to by none other than Lord Denning in his 1957’s judgment who had observed that “Even in England, however, a judge is not a mere umpire to answer the question “How’s that?”
The judge discussed transformation in cricket with the requirements of modern times as well as constraints of time concomitant, saying a five-day test match was giving way to a one-day match and even to a blitz called T20 and although Garry Sobers, Hanif Muhammad and Sunil Gavaskar were still idolised for their marathon innings in batting.
“Yet the present day heroes are the likes of Shahid Afridi who, notwithstanding the shots they play or the techniques they employ, are applauded for their obsessive, if not neurotic, hitting and for scoring as many runs as possible within the shortest possible time,” Justice Khosa observed.
Justice Khosa regretted that the judges were generally still sticking to their old and archaic style of writing judgments that was causing a disconnect between the judiciary and the litigants because the decision-making was slow, long and out of pace with the influx of cases.
“We have found the present case to be a classic example of such disconnect as despite about 180,000 cases pending and clamouring for decisions before the Lahore High Court and the learned judge-in-chamber of the said court had indulged in the luxury of writing as many as 12 pages for dismissing the petitioner’s application for bail which was merely an interim matter pertaining only to regulating custody of the petitioner during his trial,” the judge remarked.
The judge remarked that the matter could have been decided by the judge-in-chamber through a shorter order, saving the court’s precious time for attending to other similar matters of urgency.
Justice Khosa ruled that it’s time to break away from the approaches of the past and for out of the box solutions to situations which apparently have no traditional remedies.
It proposed that in future, unless necessities of the case, a shorter format for deciding a bail matter may be adopted by all the courts. The judgment also carries the format.
Muhammad Shakeel had filed a petition before the apex court against the order passed by an LHC judge wherein his bail was rejected in a case registered under sections 148, 302 and 149 of the PPC.
The SC converted the petition into an appeal and granted bail to petitioner subject to furnishing of surety bonds. Justice Shahid Bilal Hassan of the LHC had on Feb 4, 2014 dismissed the bail petition of Shakeel.