TOI | Nov 4, 2018
LUCKNOW: After repeatedly summoning doctors to decipher unreadable medico legal reports in many cases, a Lucknow bench of Allahabad high
court has directed the principal secretaries of home and medical and health services departments and the director general, medical and health services,
to ensure that doctors submit computerised reports along with original handwritten ones for facilitating the courts of law, in the interest of
administration of criminal justice.
The computerised report will have to be signed by the doctor as a true copy of original or by an authorized signatory after comparing it with the
original. It would also form part of the police report at the time of conclusion of investigation, the court said.
Despite imposing costs on doctors, they have not been recording medico legal reports and postmortem reports in clear handwriting and hence court has
to summon them for deciphering the reports for adjudication. A division bench of justice Ajai Lamba and justice D K Singh said, “Summoning a
doctor simply for reading the report authored by him for bad handwriting does not make administrative sense.”
Disposing of a writ petition challenging an FIR, the court said, “We hereby take judicial notice of the fact that a doctor in a government medical facility
is required to examine a large number of patients in a day. If for every hearing in revision jurisdiction, bail jurisdiction before the court of magistrate,
court of sessions or the high court or in appellate jurisdiction, government medical practitioner is required to appear, the work of the doctor in the
hospital shall suffer and a large number of patients would be deprived of the services of such medical specialist.”
Reiterating that the relevance of medico legal reports in cases is enormous, the bench said, “The medical reports, however, are written in such shabby
handwriting that they are not readable and decipherable by advocates or judges.”
