DELHI HC issues guidelines for preserving electronic records

The Delhi High Court has issued guidelines to the subordinate criminal courts, where evidence, including that obtained through video conference, and statements of parties are recorded electronically during the trial, to preserve the digital records after uploading their copies to a central server.

Justice S. Muralidhar laid down the principles for preserving the electronic records over the weekend while setting aside a trial court’s order convicting an employee of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) in a corruption case.

The judge observed that the trial court had overlooked the discrepancies in the evidence produced before it.

The counsel for the DDA employee, Surender Singh, who appealed against the trial court’s verdict of 2008, pointed out during the hearing in the High Court that the soft copy of Mr. Singh’s statement was not available on the hard disk of the trial court’s computer on which it was typed.

When counsel Sunil Mittal approached the trial court, he was informed that Mr. Singh’s statement, recorded under Section 313 of the Criminal Procedure Code, was not available.

Important document

The High Court observed that this was an important document in every criminal case, though it did not make much difference in the present case as the appeal deserved to be allowed for other reasons.

In its 12-page judgment, the court said every page of the evidence or statement typed electronically will have a footer indicating the number of the case in the left hand corner and the page out of the total number of pages of that document in the right hand corner.