EMPEROR Vs. BHIKHA GOBER

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THIS is an appeal by accused No.1 against his conviction of the offence of murder by the Sessions Judge of Kaira. The other accused was acquitted.

(2.) THERE is no doubt that a woman named Bai Vakhat, the wife of the complainant, was murdered in a field in the afternoon of October 1, 1942, The only question is whether the appellant was guilty of the murder, as the learned Sessions Judge held. The assessors were of opinion that the case was not proved. THERE were two eye-witnesses to the offence,-Balu (exhibit 9) and Jamal (exhibit 10)-, and the learned Judge and all the assessors have disbelieved those eye-witnesses. Judging merely from the depositions, I feel myself some doubt whether the learned Judge and assessors were right in disbelieving that evidence, particularly the evidence of Balu, who says that he narrated what he saw to Rama the same night and to the complainant the next day, and both the witnesses corroborate his statement. Balu and Jamal, according to their statements, witnessed the offence from different sides of the field, and, therefore, they might or might not have seen each other, and according to their evidence they did not see each other. I should have expected that, if the evidence was concocted, the witnesses would have been careful to say that each noticed the other doing something which the other said he was doing. However, there it is. The learned Judge and the assessors who saw these witnesses in the box disbelieved them, and it would not be right for this Court to overrule their opinion, when we have not had the advantage of seeing these witnesses. It is quite possible that if we had seen the witnesses, we should have agreed that they were not telling the truth. But if one disbelieves the evidence of these eye-witnesses, it necessarily follows that an attempt has been made to manufacture evidence against the accused, and that necessitates the Court being particularly careful in relation to the rest of the evidence.

(3.) IN the present case in the absence of eye-witnesses we have no evidence whatever to connect the accused with the murder. It is obvious that somebody else might have committed the murder, and the accused might have acquired the ornaments from that person; or he might have robbed the deceased, and somebody have subsequently murdered her. The mere fact that he produced, shortly after the murder, ornaments which were on the murdered woman is not enough, in my opinion, to justify an inference that the accused must have committed the murder.