Supreme Court Delivers Split Verdict On Police Officers' Convictions In Decades-Old Custodial Death Case

The Supreme Court has delivered a split verdict in an appeal by police officers convicted of culpable homicide not amounting to murder and other offences in a decades-old custodial death case for alleged torture and death of a man in police custody in December 1995.A bench of Justice CT Ravikumar and Justice Sanjay Kumar delivered a split verdict, particularly on the issue of conviction of the accused under section 304 Part II IPC. The two judges disagreed on the following aspect, as explained by Justice Kumar –“This is the major point of divergence between our views. My learned brother has acted upon the premise that once the dead body is said to have been traced and it is, then, not proved to be of that person, it would be fatal to the case of the prosecution. Permitting this premise to gain acceptance would mean that those in the police organization, who resort to such nefarious methods, can take this easy way out to ward off a finding of guilt. When sufficient evidence is available to conclude that Shama was in no position to escape from the custody of the appellants, the inevitable corollary that follows is that he died due to their torture while in their custody.”While Justice Ravikumar set aside the convictions under section 304 IPC, Justice Kumar acquitted them.“It is high time that our legal system squarely faces the menace of police excesses and deals with it by putting in place an effective mechanism to obviate such inhuman practices”, Justice Kumar added.Justice Ravikumar emphasised that the prosecution must prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt and cannot rely on the weakness of the defence's arguments. He noted that the burden on the defence to prove an alternate theory (such as escape of the deceased) is not as stringent as that on the prosecution, but only requires a preponderance of probabilities.“There can be little doubt with respect to the position that a Court is not justified in deciding a case upon its own suspicions or suppositions after discarding the evidence adduced by Criminal the parties and that defence evidence is also to be appreciated in the same manner as it is to appreciate the prosecution evidence, but with the understanding that in the case of accused the standard of proof required is only preponderance of probabilities”, he said.“In Noor Aga's case, this Court observed and held that superficially a case might have an ugly look and thereby, prima facie, shaking the conscious of any court. But it is well settled that suspicion, however high it might be, could under no circumstances be held to be substitute for legal evidence”, he highlighted.FactsOne Shama@Kalya was taken into police custody in connection with a burglary. He was allegedly detained without a formal arrest and subjected to third-degree torture. Shama's family claimed that he was beaten by the police, leading to his death. To cover up the death, the accused police officers allegedly created false records and staged an escape story. The body of a burnt man, believed to be Shama, was found buried in a forest on December 31, 1995.The trial court found the police officials guilty under various sections of the IPC, including Sections 304 Part II (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), 330 (voluntarily causing hurt to extort a confession), (wrongful confinement), and (extortion) but acquitted them of murder charges under Section 302 IPC. The Bombay High Court partially upheld the conviction but acquitted the officers of the charge of destroying evidence (Section 201 IPC) related to the burning of Shama's body, as it found the fingerprint evidence inconclusive. Thus, the convicts filed the present appeals before the Supreme Court. The case involved a total of seven convicts. Accused no. 2 and 4 were convicted under section 304 IPC by the HC.Justice CT Ravikumar's opinionJustice Ravikumar held that the appeal filed by the accused no. 1 stood abated citing his subsequent death.Justice CT Ravikumar upheld the conviction of accused nos. 2 to 5 under Sections 330, 348, and 387. He ruled that the evidence against the accused was sufficient to maintain their conviction for custodial torture. However, he acquitted all the accused of all other charges, including Section 304 Part II IPC, citing insufficient proof linking the injuries to Shama's death. The highlighted that despite the High Court's reversal of key findings that weakened the prosecution's case regarding custodial death, neither the State nor any relatives of the victim filed an appeal against the High Court's judgment.Despite the prosecution's reliance on a fingerprint test to identify the burned body as Shama's, the HC had rejected this evidence, noting that the test was based on guesswork rather than scientific certainty. Justice Ravikumar opined that without conclusive identification of the body, the conviction for culpable homicide could not be sustained.Justice Ravikumar stated that while a conviction for homicide does not require the dead body to...

Supreme Court Delivers Split Verdict On Police Officers' Convictions In Decades-Old Custodial Death Case

Amisha Shrivastava

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