The Allahabad High Court has acquitted three surviving accused who had been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in a murder case dating back to 1982.
The Division Bench of Justice JJ Munir and Justice Sanjiv Kumar recently held that the prosecution had failed to establish the guilt of the accused beyond reasonable doubt, adding that the trial court had arrived at its conviction on conjectural reasoning and improper appreciation of evidence.
The case stemmed from the alleged murder of a labourer near the south-west bank of a canal in village Bhadri, Prayagraj, on July 8, 1982. The informant contended that his brother had been assaulted by a group of individuals, allegedly including the appellants, who threatened him and forced him to work for their rivals. It was claimed that one of the assailants attacked the deceased with a lathi during the assault. Subsequent threats were allegedly issued to the informant against lodging a complaint.
A First Information Report (FIR) was registered at the Soraon police station, and a criminal investigation was carried out against 11 accused. Following the trial, the Additional Sessions Judge convicted all the accused under Sections 302, 147, and 149 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (IPC), imposing sentences of life imprisonment.
During the pendency of the appeals, eight of the appellants died, resulting in the abatement of proceedings against them. The appeals of the surviving accused—Amrit Lal, Harish Chandra, and Kallu—were thereafter taken up for hearing.
After going through the medical evidence and other material on record, the High Court observed that the testimonies of the deceased’s brother and uncle suffered from unexplained lacunae, particularly in relation to how the uncle came to know of the alleged assault. The Court noted that if an unknown informant intended to convey information to the deceased’s brother, it was improbable that it would be routed indirectly through the uncle.
It further found temporal and logistical inconsistencies in the prosecution’s version. From the time the informant was alerted to the assault to the time he assembled villagers and reached the site, at least an hour would have elapsed, which made it highly improbable that eleven assailants could have continued to assault the victim with lethal intent yet inflict only ten injuries. The bench remarked that the conduct of the informant and his uncle—traveling unarmed via a longer route to the scene—was inconsistent with reasonable prudence and raised further doubts about the prosecution narrative.
The Division Bench pointed out the conflict between ocular and medical evidence. While the informant and his uncle alleged insertion of a lathi into the deceased, the post-mortem examination conducted by the relevant medical officer recorded no such injury. The Court emphasised the principle established in precedents such as State of U.P. v. Ram Sharan and Bali Ram v. State of U.P. that in instances of conflict, the ocular testimony must be reconciled with medical evidence, and where the latter completely contradicts the former, the prosecution case suffers a fatal infirmity. In the instant matter, the medical evidence effectively negated the eye-witness account, giving rise to substantial doubt about the identity of the assailants.
Considering the totality of evidence and the contradictions therein, the High Court concluded that the deceased had been murdered by an unknown person during the dark hours of the night and that the prosecution had utterly failed to discharge its burden of proof under the standard enshrined in Section 101 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872.
The trial court had erroneously relied on conjectures and hyper-technical interpretation of evidence, thereby misapprehending the case, it noted and acquitted the three surviving accused of all charges, setting aside their convictions and life sentences under Sections 302, 147, and 149 IPC.
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