A person cannot be held guilty of murder merely for the reason that he was the person last spotted with the victim of the crime, the Supreme Court has held.
“In a case where the other links have been satisfactorily made out and the circumstances point to the guilt of the accused, the circumstance of ‘last seen together’ and absence of explanation would provide an additional link which completes the chain. In the absence of proof of other circumstances, the only circumstance of last seen together and absence of satisfactory explanation cannot be made the basis of conviction,” a Supreme Court Bench of Justices L. Nageswara Rao and Navin Sinha held in a recent judgment.
The court observed that “suspicion cannot take the place of legal proof, for sometimes, unconsciously it may happen to be a short step between moral certainty and legal proof.”
Though laying down the law, the Supreme Court however pushed into the realm of uncertainty a 25-year-old case regarding the finding of the severed body of Rekha Dutta on the railway tracks near her home in the sparsely populated tea gardens of Assam.
Ms. Dutta was last seen together with Jitendra Nath Kakati, an assistant manager at the Gotanga tea estate, inside a staff bungalow on the night of December 27, 1992.
She had disappeared after that sighting. Her family, residing in the neighbourhood, had caught the couple inside another bungalow on a previous occasion, after which Kakati had promised to marry her.
The judgment notes how her body parts were found lying scattered 40 metres across the rail track two days later. Kakati and some other persons were arrested and booked for murder and rape.
The trial had acquitted them for lack of evidence. However the High Court set aside the trial court judgment and sentenced them to life imprisonment.
Meanwhile, Kakati died in the course of litigation and the case against him abated.
