New Delhi: In a stinging rebuke to investigators, the Supreme Court Tuesday acquitted two men, one of whom was on death row, in a 13-year-old case of rape and murder of a minor girl in Uttar Pradesh, terming it a “classic example of lacklustre and shabby investigation”.
The bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sanjay Karol and Sandeep Mehta found “crucial flaws” in the prosecution’s case, and observed that the investigation and trial had “fallen woefully short” of proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt. It thus overturned an Allahabad High Court order of 2018 by which the conviction and sentence awarded to the accused in 2014 by a trial court was upheld, and directed that the men be released.
The case goes back to the evening of 4 September, 2012, when a 12-year-old girl went to attend “the call of nature” and never returned. Her denuded body was found in a rice field the next morning, with her belongings strewn in a nearby plot cultivated by accused Putai. The court order laid out the details of the case.
On 7 September, an FIR was registered at Mohanlalganj police station in Lucknow for offences relating to rape, murder and causing disappearance of evidence. The police investigation led to the arrest of the appellants in the apex court, Putai and co-accused Dileep, on the same day.
Post trial, the Additional Sessions Judge, Lucknow, convicted both men on 14 March, 2014, sentencing Putai to death and Dileep to life imprisonment.
The Allahabad High Court on 11 October, 2018, upheld the trial court’s decision and dismissed the appeals by both men, leading them to move the Supreme Court contending that they were innocent and their conviction was based “purely on conjectures and surmises”.
Setting aside their conviction, the SC noted: “We feel the present case is another classic example of lacklustre and shabby investigation and laconic trial procedure which has led to the failure of (proper conviction in) a case involving brutal rape and murder of an innocent girl child.”
The bench underlined the “settled tenet of criminal jurisprudence”: in a case based purely on circumstantial evidence, the prosecution must prove its case beyond reasonable doubt.
“The distance between ‘may be proved’ and ‘must be proved’ is small but has to be travelled before the prosecution can seek conviction,” it added.
The many flaws in the prosecution’s case, according to the court, included DNA reports furnished in the matter, lack of documentation, broken chain of custody of crucial evidence and doubtful testimony.
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DNA report ‘piece of trash’
In its 64-page verdict, the SC noted that the reliance placed by the trial court and HC upon DNA reports in the case was “absolutely unjustified”.
The first report, dated January 2014, did not yield any conclusive results, the SC order notes, adding that the prosecution had also failed to establish the sanctity of the blood samples which were collected from the accused after a gap of almost two-and-a-half months.
As the first report was inconclusive, the police got a supplementary DNA report dated December 2014. This was produced before the HC when the latter was hearing the accused’s appeal, notes the order.
Finding several flaws in it, the top court said the second report was “inconsequential and inadmissible as evidence”. It also observed that “there was hardly any possibility of any such supplementary DNA report being prepared” given that “specimen samples (of the accused) must have been consumed” when the first report was prepared.
“As is apparent, the conclusions in the first DNA report and the supplementary DNA report are in stark contradiction,” the court noted, also observing that the DNA report, a substantive piece of evidence, was tendered before court without an affidavit and by an officer who was not connected with the procedure.
During the trial, the second DNA report was never put to the accused, denying them an “opportunity to rebut the same”.
These failures, the bench said, rendered DNA reports furnished in the case as “a piece of trash paper”.
The court also flagged procedural irregularity in the filing of the chargesheet in the case. Going by the testimony of a police witness, the court said the key document was filed without cognisance of the DNA report. This means the chargesheet was filed hurriedly as the 90-day remand period was ending.
Gaps in investigation
The SC also pointed out other gaps in procedure and evidence in the case.
Firstly, the material objects including the clothes of the child were exhibited as evidence but the same “were not shown to the parents” for identification when they stepped into the witness box.
Thus, “a doubt is created as to whether the articles so recovered were actually of the child victim or not”, the bench said.
Second, the court noted that the “investigating officers did not care to examine anyone from the neighbouring fields” where the body of the child was found, despite the locality being populated, thereby creating “a doubt on the bonafides of their (officers) actions”.
The police mentioned that during the prima facie investigation of the field where the child’s body was found, a sniffer dog had “sniffed a small male comb and led the police team to the house of accused no. 2, Dileep”. However, this claim lacked documentation, according to the court.
“Failure to prepare any contemporary document for the search by the dog squad makes the entire procedure doubtful,” the court remarked.
The judgement also highlighted that crucial articles like the victim’s frock and underwear were never sent to the forensic lab for analysis, giving rise to a “strong suspicion that the recovery of these articles was planted”.
There was also “total lack of evidence regarding the chain of custody” of the samples. No witness, including the official who carried the samples to the Forensic Science Laboratory, was examined to “establish an unbroken chain”.
Doubtful testimony
The victim’s mother’s statement given during the trial that she saw Putai coming to his house, washing his face, changing his clothes and going away (on the day of the crime) was not considered as incriminating evidence by the SC. It disbelieved her because her statement about seeing the accused was not mentioned in the initial police complaint.
“Had there been an iota of truth in her story, then this fact would have definitely been incorporated in the complaint filed by her husband,” the court said.
Had it been mentioned in the complaint, it added: “the investigating officers would have definitely made an extensive search of the house of the accused-appellants to search for incriminating evidence. Evidently, no such effort was made by the investigating officers, which again establishes that the theory put forth in the evidence of Smt Chandravati (mother) is an exaggeration and nothing beyond that”.
According to the court, failure of the investigating officers to search the house of the accused-appellants was another thing that adds to “suspicion regarding the credibility of the investigating officer’s actions”.
The court finally noted that there is “no hesitation in holding that other than the allegation that the child victim’s chappals, underwear and the water canister were found in the field which was cultivated by accused Putai”, the investigation by the police has “failed to lead any credible evidence whatsoever which can be considered to be incriminating the accused appellants, what to say, of evidence which is capable of proving guilt of the accused-appellants beyond all manner of doubt”.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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