A confessional statement given by an accused under Section 15 of the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act should not be discarded merely for the reason it has been retracted during trial, the Supreme Court has held.
A Bench of Justices P. Sathasivam and H.L. Dattu said: “Confessions are usually retracted but retracted confessions are held to be good confessions if they are made voluntarily and in accordance with law. There can be no doubt that a free and voluntary confession deserves the highest credit. It is presumed to flow from a sense of guilt.”
The Bench gave this ruling, upholding the life sentence awarded by a Kanpur TADA court to Om Prakash Shrivastava alias Babloo, K.K. Saini and Manjit Singh alias Mange for the murder of Additional Collector of Customs L.D. Arora.
The Bench pointed out that Babloo's role “is that of a ‘kingpin.' But the possibility of direct evidence against a “kingpin is rather low. In most cases, it may be circumstantial. What we need to see is [that] the chain of events that the prosecution is expected to prove can be linked to the evidence incriminating Babloo.”
Incriminating evidence
Writing the judgment, Justice Dattu said: “From the evidence on record, it can safely be inferred that Babloo was the mastermind of the whole incident, and Mange and K.K. Saini committed the offence at the behest of Babloo. In our view, there is independent incriminating evidence against Babloo, even if we have to eschew the confessional statement of co-accused.”
On the contention that since the confessional statements of both Mange and Saini, though recorded in different periods, were verbatim the same and therefore “it casts a serious doubt on the alleged confessional statements,” the Bench said merely because the confessional statements of both accused were more or less similar, “it cannot be said they are neither normal nor unnatural, which would vitiate the probative value of such a confessional statement.”
The Bench said: “We hold that the confessional statement made by a person under Section 15 of TADA shall be admissible in the trial of a co-accused for offence committed and tried in the same case together with the accused who makes the confession.”
'No' to death penalty
Dismissing CBI's appeal for enhancement of the sentence to the death penalty, the Bench said: “The prosecution has not been successful in proving that this particular murder was committed with the intention of causing terror. Terror could have been caused as a consequence of the act. It is therefore evident that the intention of the accused was not to cause terror but to prevent information regarding another crime from being divulged.”
