Wide-ranging defences were valiantly urged by the appeHants before us but without merit. For, once a person pleads guilty and the Court accepts it, there is no room for romantic defences and irrelevant litanies based on the business being the mainstay of a large family, both brothers, the only bread-winners, being jailed, bazaar coming milk brought by the servant unwittingly turning out to be buffaloes' milk and what not. How can a factual contention of innocence survive a suicidal plea of guilt or teU-tale contrition wash away the provision for minimum sentence? Therefore, what is permissible is the sole legal submission that the offence falls under the proviso (i) to s. 16(1) which, if good, relieves this Court from imposing the compulsory mlnimum sentence of six months' imprisonment if sound grounds therefor exist. The desperate appellants, undaunted by one of them having been strained by a prior conviction for a food offence, half-heartedly flirted with. the misericordious submission that the Probation of Offenders Act be applied to the economic offenders. The futile plea has to be frowned off, being more a gamble in foolhardy courage than one showing fidelity to precedents or fairness to forensic proprieties. We state it to reject it so that like delinquents may not repeat it later in similar circumstances. True, petty milk vendors and poor victuallers, young apprentices in adulteration offences, trivial criminals technically guilty and others of their milk, especially when rehabilitation is feasible or repetition is impossible and the social circumstances promise favourable correctional results,_ may call the compassionate attention of the Court to the provisions of the probation law unless Parliament pre-empts its application by express exclusion (The law in this regard has since been tightened up). Equally true, that a few guileless souls in the dock, scared by the sometimes exaggerated legal fina1ity given to public analysts' certificates and the inevitable incarceration awaiting them, may enter into that dubious love affair with the prosecution called 'plea bargaining' and get convicted out of their own mouth, with a light sentence to begin with, running the risk of severe enhancement if the High Court's revisional vigilance falls on this 'trading out' adventure. This Court has animadverted on this vice of 'plea bargaining' in Murlidhar v. State of Maharashtra(1 ). Maybe, something like that happened here, as was urged before us by Shri Gobind Das for the appellants, relying, as he did, on the circumstances that the accused had crossexamined the prosecution witness as if he were innocent, added a rider to his plea of guilt and sown the seeds of a valid defence even as he was asking for mercy in punishment. We do not explore the deeper import of the quasi-compounding element or something akin to it, except to condemn such shady deals which cast suspicion on the integrity of food inspectors and the administration of justice.
