India News | SC Sets Aside Order Upholding Life Term to 11 in Murder Case
Get latest articles and stories on India at LatestLY. The Supreme Court on Friday set aside a high court order and acquitted 11 men sentenced to life imprisonment, saying their guilt was not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
New Delhi, May 23 (PTI) The Supreme Court on Friday set aside a high court order and acquitted 11 men sentenced to life imprisonment, saying their guilt was not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
A bench of Justices Abhay S Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan was hearing the appeal against a Madras High Court order, which confirmed the 2015 trial court order awarding them life imprisonment in a November 2012 murder case.
The convicts had undergone imprisonment for over nine years.
The bench said the high court and the trial court "brushed aside" the factors which made the testimonies of the three crucial prosecution witnesses unreliable and “impossible for any court to believe".
“In this case, the analysis of the evidence of material witnesses made by us shows that the trial court and high court have misread the evidence of these material prosecution witnesses. Very striking features of the prosecution's case and evidence have been ignored by the courts,” it said.
The bench said the prosecution failed to draw a panchnama or formal documentation at the time of clicking photographs of the fingerprints of two accused persons.
The bench said that if their testimonies and the alleged fingerprints were ignored, the only evidence against the accused persons was the alleged recovery of weapons at their instance and “only on the basis of recovery, by no stretch of imagination, can the accused be convicted.”
“The guilt of the accused has not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt,” the bench said and acquitted them.
The top court directed their release from custody.
(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)