STATE OF KARNATAKA Vs. DEVARAJ

JUDGEMENT

(1.) WE have pointed out to the learned SPP that even though these appeals are directed against a common judgment that there were two Session cases Nos. 282/1993 and 116/1995 against different accused persons and these two appeals are directed against the acquittal order passed in those proceedings. Accordingly, the Office shall renumber the appeal as 463/2002 along with 1688/2001.

(2.) WE have heard the learned SPP on merits at considerable length. Undoubtedly, we share the concern expressed by the learned counsel that this is a case in which an young woman has been brutally done to death in a horrifying manner and there appears to be also an attempt thereafter to mislead the authority that she had committed suicide by hanging the body. The principal difficulty that has surfaced in this case is that the investigation has been not only slow but thoroughly inefficient to the point of negligence. While the medical evidence conclusively establishes that it was a case of homicidal death because there are stab injuries on the deceased-wife which have caused her death as per the P. M. report, the police ought to have taken cognizance of the fact that if there were no eye-witnesses available that it was very necessary to investigate intelligently to go deep into the background of the case, collect all the incriminating circumstances and place them before the Court so that whoever was responsible for the death of the young wife should be appropriately dealt with according to law. We find however that the investigation, as often happens has been carried out in a totally cavalier and unprofessional manner and we are constrained to observe that in case after case relating to dowry deaths and wife burning merely because victims come from villages or because they come from a poor or middle class strata of society that the police seem to have absolutely zero interest in the investigation. It is high time for the law enforcement authorities to realise that there is equal value for human life at all levels and that when a poor person or a villager is subjected to torture, cruelty and horrifying levels of pain in these dowry death and wife burning cases, that there is absolutely no justification for the unpardonable levels of callousness regularly displayed by the police in the investigation. In this case, the learned SPP has argued vehemently that under no circumstances the guilty persons should be allowed to get away because the deceased was not only a young wife but was a young mother who had delivered a son hardly three months before the incident, that the condition of the body indicates that she had been brutally murdered and despite all these the requisite evidence is not forthcoming. We do appreciate the fact that this is a class of crimes which are invariably committed within the household or within the family and that therefore, the evidence in the form of outside witnesses will always be difficult. It is however not at all difficult to ensure that strong convincing circumstantial evidence is produced before the Court provided the investigating authorities are honestly interested in the investigation.

(3.) THE learned SPP had started by pointing out to us that the death was undoubtedly homicidal and that the suicide theory is only a cover put forward by the defence in order to hide and screen the evidence of the murder. The culprits had also put flowers over the neck of the deceased in order to try to hide the ligature marks of the hanging. This again is further evidence of an offence under S. 201, IPC. But obvious difficulty has come up in so far as the police have not established as to who was responsible for all of this.