Despite several gaffes made by the police in investigating the rape-cum-murder of a six-year-old girl in a village near Thadagam in Coimbatore district during the 2019 Parliament election campaign, the Madras High Court relied upon the scientific evidence to confirm the conviction imposed on a 36-year-old aluminium fabricator K. Santhoshkumar.
The court, however, commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment and ordered that the imprisonment should not be commuted or remitted for 25 years.
Justices P.N. Prakash and V. Sivagnanam upheld a direction given by trial judge S. Radhika to the police to conduct further investigation in the case to find out the second adult whose semen and spermatozoa were also found in oral and cervical swabs and smears taken from the body of the victim.
The court ordered that the Coimbatore Superintendent of Police should appoint an efficient woman investigating officer to conduct further investigation and nab the other accused.
The Division Bench further directed the trial court to hold an inquiry to find out whether the Thadagam police station (PS) was empowered to register a First Information Report (FIR) on March 25, 2019 on the basis of the ‘girl missing’ complaint lodged by the victim’s mother.
It was the claim of Sub Inspector of Police Boopathy that the government had not empowered Thadagam PS to register an FIR at the time of the incident and hence he had asked the complainant to approach Thudiyalur PS.
Since defence counsel Kingsley Paul Robinson, whom the Bench appreciated for conducting the case meticulously despite having been appointed by the Legal Services Authority for a meagre fee due to the indigent circumstances of the convict, had asserted that the Sub Inspector had lied and was liable to be prosecuted for perjury, the High Court directed the trial court to conduct an inquiry under Section 304 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and initiate further action against the Sub Inspector.
The Division Bench also directed the Director General of Police (DGP) to appoint an officer in the rank of Deputy Inspector General of Police to find out the officers responsible for the discrepancies in the First Information Report (FIR) which read as if it was registered at Thudiyalur PS on March 25, 2019 on the basis of a complaint lodged by the victim’s mother on the same day, though the complaint was actually dated March 26, 2019 and read that the complainant’s daughter went missing a day earlier.
Though the judges refused to set aside the conviction on the basis of the discrepancy highlighted by the defence counsel and said that it would not come in the way of the overwhelming scientific evidence available against the convict, they ordered that the DGP should fix the responsibility on the officers concerned, initiate departmental action against them and submit a report to the court within six months.
They ordered that the DIG should also inquire as to how the police allowed the media to access the scene of crime.
Shocked to find that a television channel reporter had visited the spot and recorded the entire scene of crime in the presence of the police besides narrating the reported confession given by the appellant to the police even before the latter could be produced for judicial remand, the judges ordered that the DGP should initiate suitable action against the police officials who had allowed the media to meddle with the scene of crime.
The judges refused to believe the prosecution's case that the appellant had voluntarily surrendered before two revenue officials on March 31, 2019 and confessed to have committed the crime alone.
Nevertheless, such disbelief would not lead to the convict being given a clean chit, they said.
Though the appellant, on the other hand, had claimed that the police had picked him up from his residence on March 28 and obtained his spermatozoa forcibly on March 31 , the judges refused to believe his claim too since the swabs and smears had been sent for DNA analysis much before March 31.
