NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed three pleas filed by sacked IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, including the one alleging bias against a lower court judge conducting his trial in an alleged drugs planting case.
A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Rajesh Bindal imposed costs of Rs one lakh each for filing three separate pleas.
The court ordered that the amount would be deposited with the Gujarat High Court Advocates Association.
At the outset, the court questioned his counsel senior advocate Devadatt Kamat for filing similar pleas in the past.
"How many times have you been to the Supreme Court, at least a dozen times, the bench said.
The court also referred to an earlier order of another bench in a similar plea filed by him.
In one plea, the former IPS officer sought transfer of the trial to another sessions court alleging bias and in the second one, he sought directions for audio-video recording of the trial court proceedings.
The third one sought adducing additional evidence in the case.
The former IPS officer was arrested in 2018 by the Gujarat CID in connection with the case of alleged planting of drugs to arrest a man.
Bhatt, the then police officer, had arrested one Sumersingh Rajpurohit, an advocate, in 1996 on charges of possessing around one kg of drugs.
Earlier, another bench on May 10 had dismissed a separate plea of Bhatt seeking a direction to submit additional evidence to support his appeal in the Gujarat High Court against his conviction in a 1990 custodial death case.
He had also sought the recusal of Justice M R Shah, since retired, from hearing his plea on May 10.
Bhatt has been a vocal critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and has filed a plea in connection with 2002 Gujarat riots.
In a separate case, Bhatt was awarded life term by a Jamnagar court after being held guilty on June 20, 2019 in a three-decade old custodial death case.
He also faced another FIR in a case was filed by the Gujarat police along with activist Teesta Setalvad and former senior police officer R B Sreekumar on the basis of the Supreme Court's judgement in the case of 'Zakia Ahsan Zafri and others Vs State of Gujarat', passed on June 24, 2022.
