Chhattisgarh High Court: In an appeal before the High Court, the appellants challenged their conviction by Sessions Judge in murder case of wife of one of the appellants under Sections 302 read with Section 34 IPC. In the present case, the deceased Basanti Bai died in the intervening night in 2006 at their village. During investigation, statements of the witnesses were recorded. The trial court after considering the material available on record by the impugned judgment convicted and sentenced the accused-appellants to imprisonment for life.
After going through the facts of the case, the Court heard the counsel for the appellant who pleaded that firstly, the cause of the death of deceased had yet not been established as the doctor in her post-mortem report had mentioned that she died due to asphyxia that may also be caused due to any general disease and thus, death cannot be called homicidal. Secondly, he told the Court that the witnesses adduced by the prosecution are hearsay witnesses, which is not legally admissible. Thirdly, he pleaded that there had been not even a single witness from the village where the incident took place, thus weakening the stand of the prosecution to a great extent.
The Court considered the fact that all the evidences taken into consideration by the trial court are the evidence of relatives of deceased and whatever had ever been spoken by the deceased during visit of their house had been reproduced by them before the Court thus, failing to be legal as per Section 60 of Evidence Act which states that oral evidence must always be direct to be admissible. To support its observation, the Court cited Kalyan Kumar Gogoi v. Ashutosh Agnihotri, (2011) 2 SCC 532 in which the Supreme Court had explained reasons as to why hearsay witnesses were not admitted like truth comes in diluted and diminished form this way and the witness in such cases will not have any responsibility on him and so on.
The Court went on to say that as the evidence upon which the inference of trial court is based is admissible, the other aspects of the matter needed to be examined in depth. The Court noticed that none of the 13 witnesses examined belonged to the village where deceased died. The Court observed that in such cases of hearsay evidence, Section 106 of the Evidence Act may be attracted if a reasonable inference can be drawn regarding the existence of certain other facts, unless the accused by virtue of special knowledge regarding such facts failed to offer any explanation which might drive the court to draw a different inference and its purpose is not to relieve the prosecution to prove the burden of guilt. But in the present case, out of all the witnesses, no one stated that the appellant was inside the house at the time of the incident.
The Bench of Ram Prasanna Sharma, J. on minute scrutiny of the facts and examined witnesses said that that suspicion however grave cannot take the place of proof and that the prosecution just in order to succeed on a criminal charge cannot afford to lodge its case only on the basis of “may be true” but has to essentially elevate it to the grade of “must be true”. [Shankarlal v. State of Chattisgarh, 2017 SCC OnLine Chh 1138, decided on 6-10-2017]
