Allahabad High Court
Queen-Empress vs Durga Charan on 23 April, 1885
Equivalent citations: (1885)ILR 7ALL672
JUDGMENT W. Comer Petheram, C.J.
1. In my opinion this Court has no power to review the order of Mr. Justice Duthoit, by which he dismissed the application for revision made by the accused, and therefore the only remedy is by an appeal to the prerogative of the Crown as exercised by the Local Government.
Brodhurst, J.
2. This is an application that this Court will, under the provisions of Section 369 of the Criminal Procedure Code, review an order passed, on revision, on the 12th August 1884, by Duthoit, J., who is no longer a Judge of this Court.
3. The question now arises whether a High Court in India can in any criminal case--i.e., as a Court of Original Jurisdiction, or as a Court of Appeal, or as a Court of revision--review its judgment or order.
4. A Full Bench of the High Court of Calcutta, in the case of Queen v. Godai Raout 51 W.R. C.R. 61 held that a review of judgment will not lie from a sentence or judgment pronounced by the High Court in a criminal case upon appeal, and the learned Judges were of opinion that "it was the intention of the Legislature that the Court should not exercise the power of reviewing its own judgment in criminal cases."
5. That Full Bench judgment was delivered on the 15th February 1866, when Act XXV of 1861 was the Code of Criminal Procedure in force; but the following extract from the judgment is still in point, even though the Code of Criminal Procedure has since then been more than once amended.
6. The Code of Criminal Procedure does not contain any section expressly authorizing a review of judgment in a criminal case after the judgment has been recorded. The Code of Criminal Procedure was passed after the Code of Civil Procedure. The latter contains a section expressly authorizing a review of judgment, but the former contains no corresponding section. From this it may reasonably be inferred that the Legislature did not intend to confer in criminal cases a power similar to that which they had given in civil cases.
7. The Legislature has not, even under the Criminal Procedure Code now in force, conferred, in express words, upon a High Court, the power of reviewing its judgments in all criminal cases as it has done under the Civil Procedure Code in civil cases; and, in my opinion, the provisions of Section 369 of the Criminal Procedure Code, so far as they affect a High Court, apply merely to questions of law arising in its original criminal jurisdiction, and which are reserved and are subsequently disposed of under the provisions of Section 434 of the Criminal Procedure Code and the corresponding sections of Letters Patent, which, for the North-Western Provinces, are Sections 18 and 19.
8. Under these circumstances, I concur with the learned Chief Justice in rejecting the application.