Advocate General CP Prasad granted permission on 30 April 2021, Friday to the filing of a petition by Advocate Janardhana Shenoy seeking the initiation of contempt proceedings against INC chief K Sudhakaran in response to his comments on the High Court's decision in the high-profile Shuhaib murder case.
According to several media sources, the political leader made disgraceful and disrespectful remarks, expressed reservations about the intellectual abilities of the judges on the bench in the given case, and expressed his conviction that the public could quickly lose confidence in the court's decision. After analysing all of the transcripts and accounts that had existed in the newspaper, this motion was approved.
The Shuhaib murder case (the one stated above) is a high-profile and politically charged problem in and of itself because it involves the murder of a congress youth member, Shuhaib, and Congress uses it to illustrate CPIM's conditions for excluding rivals. This petition said Akash, the prime suspect, and CPIM secretary P. Jayanarayan had high echelons of authority and could monitor police machinery in the district, as well as that the CM's denial of the inquiry probe was due to high pressure from the district CPIM committee. The single bench initially focused its CBI inquiry, but later in 2018, the division bench set aside the decisions, which were then followed by the Supreme Court. According to the division bench, "there was scarcely any evidence available before the writ court that may have caused it to believe that the report was intrinsically unjust or distorted in any way." The Division bench (Chief Justice Hrishikesh Roy and Justice A K Jayasankaran Nambiar) also referred to the Single bench Justice B Kemal Pasha's (since retired) decision within three weeks of the crime as a "hasty course."
The division bench observed that as of March 7, 2018, the date of the single bench's decision, the state police had detained six people and seized the weapons allegedly used in the crime.
As is evident from a perusal of the note submitted before the writ court by the State Attorney, the State police had already arrested six persons, and recovered the weapons used for the crime, within three weeks of the incident and before the case came up for consideration before the writ court.If the writ court wanted to get further details as regards the investigation carried out, it could have asked for the production of the Case Diary in Court but, for reasons that are not very clear, it chose not to do so. It did not also grant any opportunity to the State Government to file a counter affidavit in response to the averments in the writ petition. In our opinion, the aforesaid omissions of the writ court, without anything more vitiates the direction issued by it to transfer the investigation of the case to the CBI. Such a hasty direction was not warranted on the facts and circumstances of the case", said the judgment authored by Justice Jayasankaran Nambiar.
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