The High Court also awarded the now-acquitted man, Gireesh Kumar, ₹5 lakhs as compensation for his wrongful imprisonment of eleven years and the trauma he suffered while facing the death sentence.
Kumar had been convicted by a sessions court in 2018 and sentenced to death in a case involving the murder of a 57-year-old woman in Kollam.
However, he was arrested in the case much earlier, around June 24, 2013, and had remained in prison since then.
On July 3, the High Court Bench of Justices AK Jayasankaran Nambiar and Syam Kumar VM found that the prosecution had not put forth any convincing evidence to prove the criminal charges against Kumar.
The Court even opined that the botched-up investigation in the case leads to suspicions that Kumar may have been falsely incriminated in the case.
The High Court took a dim view of these lapses in investigating the case, as well as the trial court’s failure to apply due diligence while deciding on the case.
“There was no evidence whatsoever before the learned Sessions Judge to convict the appellant under any of the sections of the IPC under which he was charged, much less to sentence him to capital punishment under sec. 302 of the IPC. To top it all, there has been a total absence of any semblance of objective enquiry by the learned Sessions Judge towards ascertaining whether the case at hand was one that qualified under the categorisation ‘rarest of the rare’ justifying the imposition of capital punishment,” the High Court said.
Source: Barandbench
