DEHRADUN: Supreme Court has acquitted three minors – who are now adults – sentenced to life for the 2007 strangulation murder of a 10-year-old, holding that the prosecution failed to prove their guilt beyond doubt and relied solely on circumstantial evidence and speculative claims. A bench of Justices M M Sundresh and Satish Chandra Sharma also pulled up Uttarakhand HC for overlooking serious procedural lapses, failing to examine scientific reports and summarily rejecting juvenility claims.The bench also allowed the appeals of Nazim, Aftab and Arman Ali, who had been convicted by the additional sessions judge, Kashipur in 2014 and whose convictions were upheld by Uttarakhand high court in 2017. The boy had been found strangled in his family’s mango orchard near Kishanpur on June 5, 2007. His father initially named six neighbours — Wahid, Muslim, Arman, Jahangir, Zahid and Babu — with whom he had a long-standing feud. Nazim and Aftab were not mentioned in the FIR but were later named in the charge sheet.The trial court acquitted all except Nazim, Aftab and Arman. It relied heavily on the testimony of Tauhid Ali, the scribe of the FIR, who claimed to have overheard a conversation among the accused the night before the murder. He alleged they had planned the killing in retaliation after their sister was teased by someone from the victim’s family. HC found no issue with this testimony and upheld the convictions.SC rejected this narrative and noted that Tauhid Ali’s omission of such an explosive detail in the FIR he himself wrote made his claim deeply unreliable. It said his explanation — that he dismissed the conversation as “loose talk” due to existing family feuds — was unconvincing. The court found it “inexplicable” that a person who heard a murder conspiracy did not alert police or the complainant, calling it an “afterthought”.The bench said the idea that such a conspiracy was openly discussed at a marriage feast — where other villagers were present — “lacked plausibility.” It added, “Conspiracies to commit homicide are rarely, if ever, hatched so loudly and publicly as to be overheard by passers-by.” On the “last-seen” theory, the court found wide time gaps that weakened the chain of evidence. One prosecution witness claimed to see the boy talking to Nazim around 11am on June 5, while another said he saw all three accused walking together in the evening. The body was recovered the next morning. The bench said this gap “is too wide to exclude the possibility of intervention by others”.Scientific evidence too failed to strengthen the case. The forensic report was termed “neutral” — it neither supported nor contradicted the prosecution’s claims. The court criticised HC for dismissing the lack of DNA evidence as inconsequential and said, “To convict on doubtful testimony while ignoring scientific tests is to substitute suspicion for proof.” It added, “When the only scientific evidence available neither supports the prosecution’s narrative nor connects the accused to the crime, it is impermissible to uphold a conviction solely on doubtful eyewitness testimony.In a case based solely on circumstantial evidence, every circumstance must withstand rigorous scrutiny.” The court also said the recovery process of the evidence was “procedurally suspect”.On motive, the prosecution alleged the men sought revenge for an insult to their sister. But the court said there was no concrete evidence of any grudge against the boy or proof of animus. It held that “the absence of motive in a circumstantial case assumes significance and tilts the balance in favour of the accused.”The court also noted that Nazim and Aftab had raised a juvenility plea, supported by school records and a medical board’s opinion. However, the Juvenile Justice Board had rejected the plea based on an electoral roll. The Supreme Court did not rule on the juvenility claim since it acquitted the accused on merits but said the rejection “reinforces the perception that HC did not fully reappreciate the evidence.” The bench cited Rule 12 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000, which gives primacy to matriculation certificates or medical evidence over voter rolls.
