The Patna High Court has quashed, against the petitioner, a robbery FIR registered at Dhanarua police station, holding it to be an impermissible second FIR over the same transaction, the taking of a Tata Indica and mobile phones, that had already been the subject of an earlier case at Deepnagar. Applying the T.T. Antony ‘test of sameness’, Justice Chandra Shekhar Jha held that continuing the later case would be an abuse of the process of the court.
Upholding a life sentence for the rape of a child, the Patna High Court held that peripheral contradictions in a child victim’s testimony, explained by trauma and the natural limitations of a child witness, do not destroy the substratum of the prosecution case, while sharply criticising the perfunctory police investigation and ordering departmental action against […]
Reversing a family court that had dismissed a wife’s divorce petition for want of specific proof of cruelty, the Patna High Court granted her a decree, holding that a husband who kept his wife out of the matrimonial home for 13 years, and never contested her allegations, had by that very conduct inflicted cruelty. The Court held it could not grant divorce on irretrievable breakdown alone, but that the prolonged deprivation of married life amounted to cruelty.
Three armourer constables asked the Patna High Court to cancel the 2015 appointment of 81 colleagues made without roster clearance, and to restore their seniority, relying on a 2025 order in another case. The Court dismissed the petition on delay and laches, holding that having stayed silent for 11 years they were fence-sitters who could not ride a later favourable ruling, and that they had failed to implead any of the affected appointees.
The petitioner sought the Rs 4 lakh COVID ex-gratia payment for his father’s death, which had been rejected because no RT-PCR or antigen test was done. The Patna High Court accepted that the absence of a test report is not by itself conclusive, but held that the relaxation still requires reliable corroborative proof that the death was due to COVID, and dismissed the petition where the hospital record was silent and the death certificate placed the death at home.
An elected panchayat representative was externed under the Bihar Control of Crimes Act on the eve of the 2025 Assembly election, ordered to report 40 km from home thrice a week. The Patna High Court quashed the order, holding that the District Magistrate had no material before him but a police forwarding letter, acted as a post office without applying his mind, and violated natural justice. It awarded Rs 50,000 compensation and cautioned officials.
The Patna High Court has quashed the State Bank of India’s decision treating a long-serving officer as having “voluntarily resigned” for staying away on medical grounds, holding that absence compelled by illness is not wilful abandonment and that the Bank acted arbitrarily and in breach of natural justice. Patna: The Patna High Court has set […]
The Patna High Court granted anticipatory bail to a man in a Bihar prohibition case on the condition that he donate Rs 15,000 to the District Legal Services Authority for putting up flower pots in the Khagaria court campus, noting the liquor was seized from an open field and not from his conscious possession. Patna: […]
The Patna High Court held that a Section 125 CrPC maintenance order and voter-list entries cannot prove a valid Hindu marriage absent proof of saptapadi and essential ceremonies. Patna: The Patna High Court has held that a woman failed to establish that she was the legally wedded wife of her late husband’s younger brother, ruling […]
