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On Monday, the Delhi High Court came down heavily on a trial court for rushing through a trial involving allegations of serious offences like murder and unnatural sex with a 14 year old boy.
It is been noted that the Additional Sessions Judge (ASJ) had allowed examination of “disproportionately” large number of prosecution witnesses on a single day, wherein the bench comprised of Justice S. Muralidhar and Justice I.S Mehta observed that the there is a grave prejudice caused to the accused by the above “super-fast” track procedure observed by the learned trial judge and is confused to why was is to necessary to rush through the prosecution evidence in case of this nature and how she failed to realise that it would result in “grave miscarriage of justice- justice hurried is justice buried”.
The court was hearing to two appeals challenging an order passed in October 2014 by the ASJ wherein the accused had been sentenced to life imprisonment for kidnapping, murdering and having unnatural intercourse with a 14 year old boy.
On examining the case, the High Court noted that the trial court had examined 24 witnesses of prosecution in total wherein 22 of them had been examined on the first day of trial. Deprecating such act of trial court, the high court has said that such act of ASJ for speeding the trial process she has committed a serious error by examining a disproportionately large number of prosecution witnesses on a single day.
The court then observed that it had come across several such cases wherein the same judge has committed the same error by fixing one date for presentation of the entire prosecution evidence, despite the allegations in such cases being of serious nature.
The high court has advice the trial court to give sufficient time to the defence for their cross examination and it is necessary for the trial court to be vigilant against defence tactics that might seek to unreasonably postpone the trial and use interregnum to win over the witnesses. Where the defendants are facing death penalty, there trial court should be more cautious as well as restraint to ensure that the counsel has sufficient time to prepare for the cross examination. The court has however cautioned that a case by case approach should be taken while deciding how many witnesses should be examined in a day.
The court thereafter ruled that the prosecution had failed to prove the case with regards to other charges as well observed. It then opined that there had been a “miscarriage of justice as a result of the manner of conducting the trial by the earned trial judge” and set aside the impugned order, directing the accused to be released forthwith.
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