Trial courts censured on sentences
The courts cannot assume the role of a monarch or dictator and impose any punishment on anyone at their whims and fancies even in the absence of any legal evidence, observed the Madras High Court while acquitting a man convicted by a trial court for murder.
By : migrator
Update: 2017-03-04 22:52 GMT
Chennai
A full bench comprising Justice S Nagamuthu, Justice P N Prakash and Justice N Authinathan, besides examining a question of law as to whether a magistrate has power to grant permission to further investigate a crime, after the police had filed a final report, which had risen in this particular case involving a watchman’s murder, also held that “choked with emotion or driven by local sentiments, out of mere surmise or suspicion, a court of law cannot afford to convict any accused.”
As per the case, Subramani was accused of killing a watchman in charge of a temple and robbing it. Setting aside the lifeimprisonment sentence of the trial court the bench held that “This conclusion of the trial court is totally erroneous and illegal as pendency of other criminal cases against the accused cannot be a ground even to remotely assume that the accused was the perpetrator of the crime in the instant case.”
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