SC acquits Mumbai rape-murder case convict on death row since 2015

The case was a sensational crime that evoked public sentiments and raised questions on the safety of women in a city like Mumbai.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday spared a death row convict from the gallows, declaring him innocent in a sensational 2014 case involving the rape and murder of a 23-year-old software professional in Mumbai, as it found “gaping holes” that show “there is something more than what meets the eye” in the police’s story.

Supreme Court of India. (HT)

A three-judge bench headed by justice Bhushan R Gavai directed the accused Chandrabhan Sudam Sanap, on death row since 2015, to be released and set aside the consecutive verdicts of the trial court and the Bombay high court in December 2018 that held him guilty for the offence.

On a deep analysis of the evidence, the witnesses and the circumstantial evidence produced by the Maharashtra Police, the court said, “All these facts cumulatively constrain us to conclude that there are gaping holes in the prosecution story leading to the irresistible conclusion that there is something more than what meets the eye in this case.”

Finding serious inconsistencies in the statement of witnesses and deficiencies in the most crucial pieces of evidence to link the accused with the crime, the bench, also comprising justices PK Mishra and KV Viswanathan said, “We are constrained to come to the sole irresistible conclusion that the appellant is not guilty of the offences for which he has been charged.” On the available evidence, it said, “We are of the opinion that it will be extremely unsafe to sustain a conviction against the appellant. The prosecution has not established its case beyond reasonable doubt.”

The case was a sensational crime that evoked public sentiments and raised questions on the safety of women in a city like Mumbai. The incident unfolded on January 4, 2014 when the victim , who was then working with TCS, boarded a train from her home town in Andhra Pradesh after spending Christmas and New Year with her family. On getting down at Mumbai’s Lokmanya Tilak Terminus (LTT) early morning on January 5, she was last seen walking with a man in the CCTV footage.

When frantic efforts by her family to connect to her remained futile, police began to inquire into her sudden disappearance. On January 17 that year, her decomposed body was found off the Eastern Express Highway in Bhandup. As police zeroed in on the CCTV cameras at the LTT, she was last seen walking with a man outside the station, whom the police claimed was Sanap as minutes earlier, the CCTV showed his presence outside the train terminus. The victim’s father identified her by the ring she wore and DNA examination too conclusively established her identity.

The prosecution’s case was that Sanap took the victim on a bike, and on reaching the highway, raped and murdered her, and burnt her body.

Going threadbare into the evidence produced by the police, the top court discarded it one by one, noting in its 113-page judgment that the “circumstances relied upon when stitched together do not lead to the sole hypothesis of the guilt of the accused”. Dealing with a capital punishment case, the court was circumspect that the chain of evidence should be complete so as to leave no reasonable ground for any conclusion consistent with the accused’s innocence.

The CCTV footage, relied upon by on the prosecution as the most clinching piece of evidence, was declared “inadmissible” on account of the lapse of the police to obtain a certificate under the Indian Evidence Act to make the electronic evidence admissible in a court of law.

Justice Viswanathan, writing the judgment for the bench, said, “There is no manner of doubt that certificate under Section 65-B(4) of the Indian Evidence Act is a condition precedent to the admissibility of evidence by way of electronic record.” This was not a fact the police wasn’t aware of as they had obtained this certificate while producing the call detail record (CDR) in evidence.

The delay by the police to record evidence of witnesses as late as in February and March, two months after the January 2014 incident, could not be explained by the police as, by then, the photograph of the accused was widely circulated in the media.

“Analysing the evidence, we must record that the witnesses fail to inspire the necessary confidence that a court of law looks for, to clinchingly establish the circumstances of last seen,” the bench said. The ability of witnesses, some who were working at the railway station and another who saw the accused at the highway, to give identical accounts and recall a thing of the past was described by the court to be a “tall order” and “too big of a pill to swallow”.

Commenting on a star witness – the accused’s neighbour Nandkishore Sahu who lent him a bike that night – and who claimed that the accused confessed to him about raping the victim and burning her body, was found to be untrustworthy. The post-mortem examination showed no signs of semen from the spot or the victim’s clothes. Even during cross examination, he made many omissions, which led the court not to sustain the conviction based on the “purported extra judicial confession” given to him.

Even the recovery of the victim’s trolley bag from a woman in Nashik and the college identity card and other belongings of the victim from the accused’s sister after two months led the court “intrigued” in finally setting aside the high court judgment.