Can A Sessions Court Hold A Joint Trial Despite Separate Committal Orders? Supreme Court Explains

The Supreme Court has clarified that committal orders do not determine whether a trial would be conducted jointly or separately, holding that the decision rests exclusively with the trial court.

“…the committal order/s is/are not determinative of whether the trial is single/separate/joint; which is at the exclusive discretion of the Court.”, observed a bench of Justice Sanjay Kumar and Justice K. Vinod Chandran.

The Court said that “a committal order just gives the Sessions Court cognizance over the trial of the persons committed and is not the basis of the cognizance taken for trial”, i.e., it doesn't control the manner in which the trial should be conducted.

The aforesaid clarification was made by the Court, while hearing a case where two committal orders were made in a sessions trial arising out of an alleged same incident and corresponding FIR related to the same. Initially, evidence was recorded separately in the two Sessions Cases.

Subsequently, the Sessions Court clubbed the two cases and conducted the joint trial. However, while pronouncing the judgment, the court delivered a separate judgment in the two Sessions Cases on the same day.

The judgment authored by Justice Chandran held that the joint trial did not suffer from any illegality since no prejudice was shown to have been caused to any of the accused. The Court observed that where one or more accused are initially left out of the trial due to their absence, but become available before the trial has commenced, the Sessions Court may try them jointly with the other accused. It clarified that the Sessions Court is not bound to hold a separate trial for such left-out accused merely because separate committal orders were passed, and the decision whether to conduct a joint or separate trial lies within the court's discretion.

“When separate commitments are made of distinct offences not coming within the exception to Section 233, they cannot be tried at one trial. But, if there are separate commitment orders; (i) of persons who could be tried together or (ii) of the same person for offences which could be tried together, the accused could still be tried at one trial. Persons accused of committing a particular offence or offences jointly or in the course of the same transaction are not put up for trial at the same time, oftener than ever for reason of some being not available. When they are later made available and subsequently committed, the Sessions Judge is not bound to have two separate trials, one with respect to each commitment, if the trial in the first instance has not commenced.”, the Court observed.

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