I know when I am beaten!  A few days ago I posted what at least one person took as a real challenge: here was a lengthy sentence from a recent decision of the Supreme Court in Ghana, I said; could anyone best 144 words for a single sentence? Turns out that someone could. “Suhrith” from Madras, India, who describes himself as a lawyer, a writer and a Man United fan, replied via Twitter with a stunning wowzer of a sentence from Indian Supreme Court Justice Dipak Misra.  Suhrith quoted a May 2017 piece by Prachi Shrivastava of Legally India who wrote that the sentence, from a 2015 decision, had just been unearthed, and that Judge Misra’s “frustration” with the case “was particularly linked to the rampant abuse of a procedural provision.” The judge’s opening sentence went on for an astounding 192 words. According to Shrivastava, the gist of the sentence was that the case before Judge Misra was “frivolous litigation, filed to harass and arm-twist the opposing party into agreeing to an out-of-court settlement.”

Shrivastava noted, “In the judgment delivered on 19 March 2015, with Justice PC Pant, in the case of Priyanka Srivastava and Anr vs State of UP and Ors, Misra (wrote) what must rank as one of the longest sentences ever written in a Supreme Court judgement.”

For your awed enjoyment, here it is:

The present appeal projects and frescoes a scenario which is not only disturbing but also has the potentiality to create a stir compelling one to ponder in a perturbed state how some unscrupulous, unprincipled and deviant litigants can ingeniously and innovatively design in a nonchalant manner to knock at the doors of the Court, as if, it is a laboratory where multifarious experiments can take place and such skillful persons can adroitly abuse the process of the Court at their own will and desire by painting a canvas of agony by assiduous assertions made in the application though the real intention is to harass the statutory authorities, without any remote remorse, with the inventive design primarily to create a mental pressure on the said officials as individuals, for they would not like to be dragged to a court of law to face in criminal cases, and further pressurize in such a fashion so that financial institution which they represent would ultimately be constrained to accept the request for “one- time settlement” with the fond hope that the obstinate defaulters who had borrowed money from it would withdraw the cases instituted against them.

Tags: India, Justice Dipak Misra, sentence length, Suhrith, Supreme Court