90% burns, but no accusation: Why HC fell back on dying woman’s words to acquit husband after 28 yrs

Trial court had relied on a contested suicide note to convict the man on the dowry complaint lodged by his father-in-law.

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Gurugram: Geetika Sharma had 90 percent burns when she was wheeled into PGI Chandigarh. She was conscious enough to speak. All she told a doctor and a judicial magistrate was that she was painting the kitchen wall, dipping her brush in kerosene, when the bottle spilled near a lit gas stove and her clothes caught fire.

28 years on, a trial court conviction and seven years of a sentence later, the Punjab and Haryana High Court has ruled that the account, given before her family had arrived at the hospital, should have been enough to acquit her husband, Bhanu Parkash.

The couple had married in February 1993. On 4 August 1998, at her Yamuna Nagar home, she suffered horrific burns. Her husband and neighbours rushed her first to the Railway Hospital, then to PGI Chandigarh. That evening, a magistrate recorded her statement — accidental fire, no one blamed.

She died five days later, on 9 August. Her father, Sakesh Mani Sharma, moved a police application against Bhanu that same afternoon, alleging dowry harassment, a Rs 1 lakh draft, a refrigerator, a Yamaha motorcycle, ten tolas of gold, all allegedly given at the wedding and still not enough. He also named Bhanu’s father and elder brother.

A trial court convicted Bhanu under Section 304-B (dowry death) of the erstwhile Indian Penal Code (IPC) and sentenced him to seven years of imprisonment.

The letter that swung both ways

Central to the prosecution’s case was a note, allegedly written by Geetika on 3 May 1998, naming her husband and in-laws and warning that they would be responsible if anything happened to her. A forensic lab confirmed it was her handwriting.

But the note’s chain of custody was shaky from the start — police records showed it wasn’t recovered from the husband’s house as claimed, but produced later by the father. When the defence counsel sought a second forensic opinion, comparing the note against letters the deceased’s mother admitted were genuinely hers, the results were opposite: the handwriting didn’t match.

With two conflicting expert opinions on the same document, Justice Mandeep Pannu found that the note alone made it unsafe to hang a conviction on.

The judgment lays out a sequence that, taken together, persuaded the bench: Geetika’s account to the doctor, made before anyone could have coached her; her formal statement to the magistrate; the fact that she lived five more days with her mother by her bedside at PGI, and never once used that time to name her husband; and the FIR that arrived only after she died.

“If the deceased had actually been subjected to dowry-related cruelty and if, as is now alleged, the appellant had deliberately set her on fire, there was sufficient opportunity for the deceased to disclose the same to her mother or other family members,” the court observed, noting that no such complaint was ever made while Geetika was alive.

The court also weighed the husband’s conduct — he wasn’t in the house when the fire broke out, having gone to fetch their son from the school bus, and returned within minutes to take her to hospital rather than flee.

It rejected the complainant’s theory that this absence and return was staged.

‘Presumption cannot be invoked mechanically’

The prosecution had leaned on Section 113-B of the Evidence Act, which deals with the presumption of abetment in cases of dowry deaths. But the court held that presumption only switches on after the foundational facts are proved beyond reasonable doubt — and here, it said, they weren’t.

Citing the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Shoor Singh vs Uttarakhand, the bench held that mere admissibility of evidence doesn’t guarantee its reliability, and that courts must weigh it against the surrounding circumstances before accepting it.

“The burden never shifts to the accused to prove his innocence unless the prosecution first establishes the foundational facts of the offence,” the order states.

On 18 August, the High Court set aside the conviction and seven-year sentence of Bhanu Parkash. A connected revision petition filed by Geetika’s father, seeking enhancement of the sentence, was dismissed.

(Edited by Tony Rai)