‘This is the time to face police excesses’, what did the judge say about policemen accused of murder

The Supreme Court has given a split verdict in a 29-year-old case. A two-judge bench was hearing a 1995 murder case on Wednesday (September 25, 2024), in which one judge acquitted the accused in the murder case, while the other refused. In this case, the court was hearing the petition of policemen accused of culpable homicide.

According to the report of news agency PTI, a bench of Justice Sanjay Kumar and Justice C.T. Ravikumar was hearing the case. Justice C.T. Ravikumar acquitted the accused policemen of the charge of culpable homicide, while Justice Sanjay Kumar disagreed with this and also made sharp remarks for the accused. The policemen are accused of torturing the burglary accused in police custody and tampering with the records. They are accused that due to this the person died.

Justice Sanjay Kumar said, “It is high time that our judicial system confronts the threat of police excesses and deals with it by establishing an effective mechanism to prevent such inhuman practices.” He wrote in his dissenting judgment, “The fact is that when sufficient evidence is produced to prove custodial torture by the police, the police itself has to prove its innocence, whether it is a case of death in police custody or disappearance or disappearance of the victim.”

He said the accused policemen cannot be acquitted just because they were clever enough to fabricate the story of Shama alias Kalia (deceased) escaping from their custody. Quoting an expert, Justice Sanjay Kumar said, “Torturing or killing a person in police custody is, to put it mildly, illegal, but the real question is what can iron do when gold rusts? The question is can courts deploy police against police?”

Justice Sanjay Kumar said, ‘On the contrary, I will uphold the conviction and sentence of the appellants as confirmed by the High Court and dismiss all the appeals.’ On the other hand, Justice C.T. Ravikumar acquitted the accused policemen of the charge of murdering the detainee. According to the prosecution, the alleged history-sheeter Shama alias Kalia was taken into police custody for questioning in connection with the burglary incident at the residence of Vijay Aggarwal in Gondia, Maharashtra. Accordingly, he was accused of stealing items worth more than Rs 1 lakh on December 7, 1995 and was tortured in custody, resulting in his death on December 22.

The police did not record his arrest while keeping him in custody. Later, an unidentified body was found in a forest under Tirodi police station in Balaghat district of Madhya Pradesh, which was burnt. It was also alleged that after committing the heinous crime, the accused policemen fabricated a case and fabricated false evidence to avoid prosecution for the custodial death. According to the prosecution, they later used Deepak Lokhande as Shama to claim that the accused escaped from their custody and the policemen allegedly manipulated the records to prove it. The prosecution said that the policemen drove Lokhande away in their jeep to make it look like Shama had escaped from custody.

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