New Delhi: The Supreme Court has said it is expected that the courts should deal with cases in a more realistic manner and not allow the criminals to escape on account of procedural technicalities and perfunctory investigation while dismissing appeals filed by a man and his mother against their conviction for cruelly treating his wife, who died due to poisoning.
A bench comprising justices JB Pardiwala and Prashant Kumar Mishra stressed that courts are expected to be sensitive in cases involving crime against women. “The role of courts in such circumstances assumes greater importance and it is expected that the courts would deal with such cases more realistically," said the bench.
The apex court, in its judgment delivered on October 6, said the court should not allow the criminals to escape on account of procedural technicalities, perfunctory investigation, or insignificant lacunas in the evidence as otherwise the criminals would receive encouragement and the victims of crime would be discouraged by the criminals going unpunished.
The apex court’s judgment came on the appeals filed by the two convicts challenging a March 2014 order of the Uttarakhand High Court (HC), which upheld the trial court order, convicting the husband and mother-in-law of the deceased in a 2007 case. The bench also dealt with the issue relating to the applicability of Section 106 of the Evidence Act, which pertains to the burden of proving fact, especially within knowledge.
The bench said that the ordinary rule, which applies to criminal trials in this country is that the onus lies on the prosecution to prove the guilt of the accused is not in any way modified by the provisions contained in Section 106 of the Evidence Act. “Section 106 cannot be invoked to make up for the inability of the prosecution to produce evidence of circumstances pointing to the guilt of the accused. This Section cannot be used to support a conviction unless the prosecution has discharged the onus by proving all the elements necessary to establish the offence”, it said.
In the present case, the husband, Balvir Singh, was convicted of murder and 498-A (subjecting a married woman to cruelty) of the Indian Penal Code, and the deceased’s mother-in-law was held guilty of the offence under Section 498-A (husband or relative of husband of a woman subjecting her to cruelty) of the IPC.
In 1997, the victim married the accused and in June 2007, the victim’s father had filed an application in a magisterial court seeking an FIR in connection with the death of his daughter under suspicious circumstances in May 2007. Later, the woman’s husband and mother-in-law were arrested. The mother-in-law was awarded a two-and-a-half-year imprisonment by the trial court. The apex court reduced the sentence of the mother-in-law of the victim to the period already undergone.
During the trial, both accused claimed innocence and said they were implicated in a false case. The apex court observed that the cause of death was poisoning, and said, “We completely rule out the theory of suicide as sought to be put forward on behalf of the appellants”.
The apex court said, “In the case on hand it has been established or rather proved to the satisfaction of the court that the deceased was in the company of her husband i.e., the appellant-convict at a point in time when something went wrong with her health and therefore, in such circumstances the appellant-convict alone knew what happened to her until she was with him”.
