RAJINDER KUMAR AND ANOTHER Vs. THE STATE

JUDGEMENT

(1.) RAJINDER Kumar and his father Jagdish Chander (hereinafter also referred to as the first and second appellants respectively) were tried by the learned Sessions Judge of Patiala on two counts for causing (1) the death of Anil Goyal alias Tonhy, aged 3 1/2, son of their neighbour Ravinder Kumar Goyal, on 5th of January, 1961, under section 302, Indian Penal Code, and (2) disappearance of the evidence of the offence of murder under section 201, Indian Penal Code. Whereas the first appellant alone has been found guilty of murder, the learned Judge has convicted both the sons and the father under the second count and has sentenced each of them to seven years' rigorous imprisonment. The sentence awarded to the first appellant for the offence of murder being one for death the proceedings are also before us for its confirmation.

(2.) THE families of both the accused and the deceased live in adjacent houses recently built in a locality known as the 'Bank Colony' in Patiala, and had known each, other even before they came to occupy these houses. Besides the appellants, the wife, sister and a child of the first appellant also reside there. The house of the deceased boy is owned by his grandfather Shri A.P. Goyal, who is the Chief Accountant in the State Bank of Patiala. The father of the deceased boy is Ravinder Kumar Goyal, aged twenty -four, and is an (sic) of the Life Insurance Corporation, Patiala, Sudha Goyal, aged twenty -two, is the mother of the deceased boy. In the house of Shri A.P. Goyal also reside his daughters Sashi Goyal and her sister.

(3.) THE case for the prosecution rests entirely on circumstantial evidence, no direct testimony of either murder or disappearance of evidence being available. An inference in such a case has to be made about a fact from the evidence of other facts concerning it, a process which all of us go through every day in our lives. In cases of calculated and cold -blooded murders, the culprit generally tries to conceal the deed committed by him and it is not a matter of surprise that we have only circumstantial evidence in support of the prosecution case. As rightly contended by Mr. Jagan Nath Kaushal, we have to be far more careful in appraisal of evidence in a case where the crime alleged, as in this case, is of a ghastly nature, generating a good deal of prejudice and ill will against the accused. The circumstances on which the prosecution places its reliance must be such as are compatible only with the guilt of the accused and this must be proved beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt keeping always in view that the burden remains on the prosecution throughout to establish its case. In the celebrated phrase of Lord Sankey in Woolmington v. The Director of Public Prosecutions 1935 A.C. 462, at 481, (at page 481), "throughout the web of the English Criminal Law one golden thread is always to be seen, that it is the duty of the prosecution to prove the prisoner's guilt" and the burden is never shifted on the defence to prove the innocence of the accused. We approach a consideration of evidence of this case keeping in view this principle firmly in our minds and we make a special mention of it because Mr. Kaushal has urged with great vehemence that the circumstances brought out against the accused should be viewed independently of each other without losing sight of the presumption of innocence unless guilt is conclusively proved.