Owing to the poor handwriting of the doctors, the injury reports of the victims in three criminal cases could not be read following which a Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court penalised three doctors with Rs 5,000 fine on account of their unintelligible handwriting.

The reports were issued by the three penalised doctor at Unnao, Gonda and Sitapur district hospitals.

The fined doctors, identified as Dr TP Jaiswal of Unnao, Dr Ashish Saxena and Dr PK Goel of Sitapur, were summoned for their handwriting because the court considered it as an obstruction in their judicial work.

The bench sated that medico-legal reports and postmortem examination reports are prepared to help the advocates and judges involved in the dispensation of criminal justice. However, many reports from doctors are furnished in such shabby handwriting which is undecipherable by legal practitioners.

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“If such reports are only able to be read by medical practitioners, they shall not serve the purpose for which they are made,” added the bench.

Previously in 2012, Director General Medical and Health, Uttar Pradesh directed the doctors to issue medico-legal reports in a readable format. The doctors, in their defence, said that they were overburdened at the time they wrote the prescriptions.