New Delhi: The Supreme Court has acquitted a Bihar man who had remained under prosecution for nearly a quarter of a century on charges of dowry death and cruelty towards his wife, setting aside both his conviction by the Sessions Court and a remand order passed by the Patna High Court.
A Bench of Justice Sanjay Kumar and Justice K. Vinod Chandran held that the case reflected “a serious procedural deviation, resulting in a graver travesty of justice,” noting that seventeen persons named in a single FIR over the same dowry death had been proceeded against in two separate trials arising from two final reports, with only the husband ultimately convicted despite further investigation having unearthed no evidence against the other fifteen accused.
The prosecution's case was that the appellant's wife died of burn injuries at her matrimonial home in the year 2000, allegedly on account of cruelty arising from dowry demands. The father-in-law and mother-in-law, tried separately in an earlier case, were acquitted, and in the second case, in which the husband alone was convicted, fourteen other family members were acquitted as well. The High Court had remanded the matter to the trial court on the ground that the convicted accused was not present when certain witnesses were examined before the two cases were clubbed for a period during trial.
Since the case had already been pending for a quarter century, the Court declined to remand the matter again and proceeded to decide it on merits, with counsel for the accused agreeing to forgo an appellate remedy before the High Court. On the question of the two separate trials, the Court referred to its earlier decision in Banwari v. State of U.P., observing that a committal order merely gives the Sessions Court jurisdiction over the persons committed and does not by itself determine whether a joint or separate trial should follow, holding that “the validity of a joint trial before the Sessions Judge is dependent on the fact whether the provisions of the Code justify one joint trial or not,” a decision resting exclusively with the trial court.
The Court also examined whether the trial court could take cognizance against the fifteen accused on the basis of a second final report, when an earlier closure report by another investigating officer had already found no evidence against them.
Relying on its decisions in H.N. Rishbud v. State of Delhi and Abhinandan Jha v. Dinesh Mishra, the Court reiterated that the formation of opinion on whether a case is made out lies exclusively with the investigating officer, but the Magistrate retains an independent judicial discretion to take cognizance under Section 190 of the Code of Criminal Procedure regardless of that opinion.
The Bench found that although there was an irregularity in the manner the first charge sheet had been split on the directions of the Superintendent of Police, this caused no prejudice to the accused, since the original charge sheet had itself found an offence made out against all seventeen persons.
Turning to the merits, the Court noted several infirmities in the prosecution's case: no postmortem was conducted despite the death occurring in hospital, no wound certificate was produced, and there were unexplained contradictions in the timeline given by the deceased's own family members regarding when they were informed of her injuries. The Court observed that the investigating officer had “practically not carried out any investigation” at either the matrimonial home or the hospital where the death occurred, and had admitted that apart from the complainant's family, no one from the neighbourhood came forward to testify to any marital discord.
The Bench took particular note of a dying declaration recorded by an Executive Magistrate, in which the deceased stated that the fire started accidentally while she was boiling milk on a gas stove and that none of her in-laws were responsible, and which had been discarded by the trial court on technical grounds. While declining to place primary reliance on an exculpatory dying declaration recorded while the victim remained in her husband's care, the Court held that it nonetheless raised a reasonable doubt when read alongside defence evidence of investments in the couple's joint names, an LIC policy naming the wife as nominee, and contemporaneous telegrams and phone records showing the husband had promptly informed his in-laws of the incident.
The Court held that “the accused is not obliged to prove his/her innocence and if a reasonable doubt is raised either from the unsatisfactory evidence led by the prosecution or from the evidence led by the defence its benefit should inure to the accused,” and that trial courts “would do well to bestow equal attention to the defence evidence as that bestowed on the prosecution evidence.”
Finding that the prosecution had failed to establish either a sustained dowry demand or cruelty beyond reasonable doubt, and that the High Court too had shown a casual approach in ordering a remand over an inconsequential procedural lapse, the Court allowed the appeal, acquitted the appellant, and directed that he be released forthwith if still in custody and not wanted in any other case.
Case Title: Brajesh Kumar @ Birjesh Kumar Singh vs. The State of Bihar
.webp)
