NEW DELHI: A poor
Chhattisgarh villager
thrown behind the bars for 11 years after a trial court and HC concurrently convicted him for a murder he did not commit, found his innocence proved in Supreme Court.
The case exemplified the country's snail paced
criminal justice system
. Bilaspur bench of Chhattisgarh HC took five years to uphold the trial court verdict and SC another six years to acquit him of murder charges as it found that prosecution failed to prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubts.
One Ratnu Yadav was arrested on the allegation of forcibly drowning his stepmother on March 2, 2013 at village Kharora, in Raipur.
The trial court convicted him on July 9, 2013 through a fast track trial and sentenced him to life imprisonment. HC upheld the trial court verdict on April 7, 2018.
As no advocate was appearing for him, SC engaged advocate Shridhar Y Chitale as amicus curiae to assist the court in reaching a just conclusion on scrutiny of the evidence placed on record by the prosecution. Chitale said postmortem report indicated that the death was due to drowning but the prosecution has not discharged the burden of proving that it was homicidal death.
The amicus also pointed out that the witness, the person before whom the accused is claimed to have made an extrajudicial confession, had turned hostile during the trial, thus taking away the credence of the prosecution story that the man forcibly drowned his stepmother.
A bench led by Justices A S Oka and Rajesh Bindal said, "The normal rule of human conduct is that if a person wants to confess to a crime committed by him, he will do so before the person in whom he has implicit faith. It is not the case of the prosecution that the appellant (Yadav) had a close acquaintance with this witness for a certain length of time before the incident. Moreover, the version of the witness in examination-in-chief and cross-examination is entirely different. Therefore, in our considered view the testimony of the witness is not reliable."
After finding some more similar discrepancies in the prosecution case, the bench set aside the trial court and the HC judgments, acquitted the accused and said, "the appellant's guilt has not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt."
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