NEW DELHI: For the third time this week, Supreme Court freed a man sentenced by lower courts – in a kidnapping and murder case in the latest instance – questioning their analysis of evidence, and flagging loopholes in the prosecution theory tying the accused to the crime, reports Dhananjay Mahapatra.A man was kidnapped in Telangana in 2012 and his father paid a ransom of Rs 1.5 lakh against a demand of Rs 23 lakh. His body was recovered from a fridge in a flat based on the disclosure of the accused, one of whom died during pendency of trial. A trial court convicted the five other accused. Telangana HC analysed evidence and acquitted four, but convicted one.The Supreme Court said barring the postmortem report indicating strangulation, and finding of the body, there was no substantive evidence to link the accused to the murder.Setting aside conviction and sentence, a bench of Justices J B Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran said, “That victim died of ‘asphyxia due to smothering, associated with strangulation’, is established by the autopsy report and the dead body was detected, tucked away in a refrigerator inside an apartment. But for these, there is no scrap of evidence, worthy of reliance, to connect the six accused to the murder or even the flat.”In another case, a man was accused of luring a boy with snacks to sodomise him. He was convicted by an Ambala court in April 2010 for the March 2007 “crime” of unnatural sex and murder, and given life term. Punjab and Haryana HC in Oct 2022 dismissed the appeal.
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A bench of Justices Sanjay Kumar and Sanjeev Sachdeva said police failed to conduct DNA test of the semen in the undergarment of the accused to match it with the rectal swab collected from victim’s undergarment. SC said the ‘last seen with’ theory is doubtful and that there were several missing links in the chain of the prosecution case. It acquitted the man, who had served 17 years in prison. The drawing of judicial curtains on the case had unpleasant outcomes: a man lost his young child to a crime which went unpunished, while a man unfairly convicted lost his prime years.In the third case, a murder in Bihar 25 years ago saw a trial court and Patna HC convict six persons. A bench of Justices Pardiwala and Chandran acquitted the convicts saying, “There is complete lack of evidence, and eyewitnesses testimonies do not inspire confidence… The case is not that of faulty investigation but of no probe having been carried out.
