The Supreme Court on Tuesday acquitted a man who spent 22 years in prison in a triple murder case, holding that the evidence against him was “unreliable” and expressing concern that a procedural lapse by the Orissa HC had kept him behind bars for an additional decade.
Lamenting that “access to justice continues to elude the marginalised sections of society,” a bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran acquitted Arjun Jani, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2006 in connection with a 2004 triple murder case. The court also directed the district administration and legal services authority to help rehabilitate and resettle him.
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Top court faults Orissa HC over procedural lapse
The bench criticised the Orissa High Court for dismissing Jani’s appeal against his conviction on the ground of delay, saying the decision had cost him an additional 10 years in prison.
“We are deeply dismayed, and equally perturbed by the order which rejected an application seeking condonation of delay of 3157 days and as a consequence dismissed the ‘jail memo of appeal’ against the order of conviction under Section 302 of the IPC, with sentence imposed of life imprisonment where the convict had, at the time of the impugned order suffered incarceration of 12 years and now a further period of 10 years; a total of 22 years,” the apex court said.
{{/usCountry}}“We are deeply dismayed, and equally perturbed by the order which rejected an application seeking condonation of delay of 3157 days and as a consequence dismissed the ‘jail memo of appeal’ against the order of conviction under Section 302 of the IPC, with sentence imposed of life imprisonment where the convict had, at the time of the impugned order suffered incarceration of 12 years and now a further period of 10 years; a total of 22 years,” the apex court said.
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Appeal dismissed over delay
Jani was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to life imprisonment. On January 11, 2016, the High Court dismissed his appeal after refusing to condone a delay of 3,157 days in filing it. He subsequently approached the SC, which granted him bail in May and admitted his appeal.
The apex court said, “The trial court failed to properly assess the evidence, while the High Court remained a moot spectator by dismissing the appeal on procedural grounds,” it said.
“Access to justice still eludes the marginalised sections of our society and especially those convicted and imprisoned from amongst them. As a result, Jani had ended up spending 22 years of his life in prison despite the absence of reliable evidence linking him to the crime,” it added.