The Supreme Court has ruled that courts cannot order compensation while adjudicating a bail plea because they lack the jurisdiction to do so in bail proceedings. The ruling came while setting aside an Allahabad high court order directing the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) to pay ₹5 lakh in damages to a man who was wrongfully arrested and imprisoned for four months in a drug-related case.
A bench of justices Sanjay Karol and Manmohan emphasised that bail proceedings are strictly limited to the grant or refusal of bail and cannot be extended beyond the framework prescribed by the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), now replaced with the Bharatiya Nyaya Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS).
“Time and again, the act of courts overstepping the bounds of jurisdiction has been frowned upon. The instant case is another such example,” the bench noted in a February 28 judgment.
The case arose from the Allahabad high court’s May 2024 ruling, directing the director of NCB to pay compensation to a man for alleged wrongful confinement. The Union of India, through NCB, appealed against this order before the Supreme Court.
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The man was arrested in December 2022 after NCB seized 1,280 grams of brown powder from their possession. The substance was suspected to be heroin. The agency subsequently sent two samples from the seized contraband to the Central Revenues Control Laboratory (CRPL), New Delhi, for chemical analysis. In January 2023, CRPL reported that the samples tested negative for heroin and other narcotic substances. However, the investigating officer sought permission from the special court to send a second set of another samples to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL), Chandigarh, for further verification.
In April 2023, CFSL also reported that the samples contained no narcotic substance. The following day, NCB filed a closure report, leading to the man’s release from district jail, Barabanki. Despite his release, the high court proceeded to hear his pending bail application and directed NCB to compensate him for his four-month incarceration.
Additional solicitor general SD Sanjay, appearing for the Union, argued that the high court exceeded its jurisdiction under Section 439 CrPC by awarding compensation, as bail proceedings are limited to assessing whether an accused should be granted bail or not.
On the other hand, senior counsel Pijush K Roy, appointed as amicus curiae to assist the bench, contended that ordering a second round of testing for a sample that had already tested negative was impermissible under the NDPS Act and relevant judicial precedents. He also urged that the principle of compensatory relief for fundamental rights violations should be extended to bail proceedings.
The bench, however, found substance in NCB’s appeal, and made it clear that the high court exceeded its jurisdiction under Section 439 CrPC, which governs bail matters. “It is a settled principle of law that the jurisdiction conferred upon a court under Section 439 CrPC is limited to the grant or refusal of bail pending trial,” the bench noted.
Stressing that the man’s bail plea had become infructuous upon his release, it said: “No occasion arose for the high court to pass an order delving into the aspects of impermissibility of retesting and/or wrongful confinement.”
While rejecting the grant of compensation, the court clarified that this ruling does not preclude the man from pursuing any other legal remedy for wrongful confinement.
“The undue restriction of liberty, i.e., without the backing of procedures established by law, is unquestionably an affront to a person’s rights, but the avenues to seek recourse are limited to remedies as per law. However, none was availed in the present facts,” the court stated.
Consequently, the Supreme Court set aside the high court’s direction to the NCB director for coughing up compensation.