SC sets free over a dozen convicted for murders by trial courts and HC

NEW DELHI: In the last one year, the Supreme Court has acquitted more than a dozen persons, who were convicted concurrently by the trial courts and the High Courts and sentenced to death or life imprisonment, in cases that included rape-cum-murder of a 10-year-old girl and manslaughters.
Despite repeated SC rulings that concurrent decisions of the trial courts and HCs are not to be interfered with unless found to be ‘perverse’, the SC in majority of these dozen cases in short 8-10 page judgments punched holes in prosecution evidence, which were cogent in the eyes of the trial courts and the HCs, to conclude that guilt of the convicts are not proved beyond reasonable doubt.
In each of these cases, acquittal by SC came after more than a decade of the incident. The HCs and the SC took a long time to decide the appeals of the convicts even though the trial courts had recorded convictions cases within a year or two. In most cases the convicts, prior to their acquittal, had spent years behind bars. In one case, the convict had spent 13 years, virtually a life sentence.
If they were innocent, or not found guilty, who would give them back their prime years? Can they be compensated monetarily as after being convicted by the trial courts and the HCs, they would not be accepted in any job. There is no provision in the criminal law that mandates the government to compensate a person who was innocent yet lodged to jail? Should the constitutional courts, where the appeals remained pending for years, be saddled with costs for delayed justice?

A more important question arises as heinous crimes involving manslaughter or rape-cum-murder go unpunished. What message would the SC, which has repeatedly advised the courts to be alive to the ‘cry for justice’ of the society, send to the murdered person's parents and relatives, who had felt justice had prevailed with the concurrent convictions by the courts below?
Take for example the case of a 10-year-old girl, who to quench her thirst in the searing heat of May while grazing her goats, goes to a tubewell and was raped and murdered by the tubewell operator (Ashok Vs Uttar Pradesh; judgment on Dec 2, 2024). He was convicted and sentenced to death by the trial court. The Allahabad HC confirmed the conviction but reduced the sentence to imprisonment till death.
But a bench headed by Justice A S Oka, who in fact is the author of most of the dozen instances of acquittal last year in heinous crimes, found that the accused was not given a legal aid counsel during the trial to enable him defend himself properly, thus prejudicing him during the trial.
“After 15 years of the incident, it would be unjust if the appellant is now told to explain the circumstances and material specifically appearing against him in the evidence,” the bench had said in a 37-page judgment, 20 of which were devoted to towards mandatory obligation of trial courts as well as prosecution to provide accused persons with legal aid if they are unable to engage an advocate.
Another important question, that emerges from reversal of concurrent judgments by the SC, is whether the sessions court judges, who are senior judicial officers, and the HC judges not trained enough to shift the chaff from the grain while scrutinising evidence in sensitive criminal cases?
Justice Oka led bench seems to adopt the maxim ‘it is better that 100 guilty persons should escape, than that one innocent person should suffer’. In the criminal justice system of India, police are not obliged to resume investigations into murder cases if the convict gets acquitted by the highest court. For years, they take satisfaction that the evidence collected by them resulted in conviction in trial court and confirmed by the HC. But, in the dozen cases of acquittal, the murders would remain a mystery.