Criminal law can't become means to settle scores: Supreme Court

NEW DELHI: Supreme Court has said that transgression instrumentality cannot go a level for initiation of vindictive proceedings to settee idiosyncratic scores and vendettas, and derided the expanding edifice to lodging of FIRs to settee civilian disputes.While quashing an FIR lodged much than 2 decades agone for the offence of cheating successful a onshore transaction case, a seat of Justices B V Nagarathna and R Mahadevan said, "In caller years, the machinery of transgression justness is being misused by definite persons for their vested interests and for achieving their oblique motives and agenda."While Jharkhand precocious tribunal took 15 years to disregard the plea for quashing of the FIR, SC took different six years to reverse the HC verdict. Writing the judgment, Justice Nagarathna said fixed the misuse of transgression law, "courts person to beryllium vigilant against specified tendencies". tnnSC: Duty of HC to measurement in, halt maltreatment of law Chiding the complainant for his inability to beryllium charges against the appellant, tribunal said specified actions "create important divisions & distrust among radical portion besides placing an unnecessary strain connected the judicial system, peculiarly transgression courts".Justice Nagarathna said courts indispensable guarantee that specified "acts of omission and committee having an adverse interaction connected the cloth of our nine indispensable beryllium nipped successful the bud".

The seat said each enactment of breach of spot whitethorn not effect successful a penal offence unless determination is grounds of a manipulating enactment of fraudulent misappropriation of property. "It is work of HC to intervene wherever continuation of transgression proceedings would magnitude to an maltreatment of process of law, oregon wherever the quality is purely of a civilian quality and transgression colour has been artificially fixed to it," it said.