The Supreme Court has decried the attempts by some convicted accused to rake up the decided issues in a case in the garb of cloudy fictions and ruled that a litigant does not have “unlimited” right to approach the courts on the same issue in a bid to escape the punishment under the law. “The easy access to justice should not be misused as a licence to file misconceived or frivolous petitions again and again,” a SC bench of Justices B.S. Chauhan and J.S. Khehar ruled while imposing a fine of `20,000 on a “black marketer” from Haryana convicted with a sentence of one year and fine way back in 1999.
But after his conviction, Sunil Kumar had made four attempts to approach the courts raking up one or the other issue in his case in a bid to escape the penalty.
“The petitioner being a black-marketer presumed that he had a right to dictate terms to the courts and get desired results, thus approached the SC again and sought the same relief, which he earlier sought from the Punjab and Haryana high court,” the bench said while reinforcing the law that “no litigant has unlimited right to waste the time of the court and public money in order to get his affairs settled in the manner he wishes.” The SC pointed out that Kumar’s case had thrown up important questions of law on whether there should be any restrain on a litigant, or whether he should be permitted to abuse the judicial process as he liked.