A court in Panvel, which sentenced three men to life imprisonment for the murder of the former chairperson of the Maharashtra State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, said that just because the accused did not abscond does not mean that they did not commit a crime, said the detailed order made available on Wednesday.
On Saturday, the court convicted the three men on the charges of robbing and murdering Meenakshi Jaiswal at her residence in Kharghar in Navi Mumbai on December 19, 2014.
One of the grounds on which the accused claimed innocence was that they did not abscond after the alleged crime and they were arrested from their homes in Kharghar. The lawyers of the three accused—Manindarsingh Bajwa, Suraj Jayswar and Vinayak Chavan—argued that they would not have been present at their homes if they had committed a crime. The three men, including Jayswar who was the driver of the deceased, were arrested on December 20, 2014, a day after the murder.
“Accused had not absconded does not mean that they had not committed any crime. There is no uniform conduct of criminals to abscond after commission of crime,” Additional Sessions Judge S C Chavan said in the order.
The accused had also claimed many discrepancies in the probe, including that the call data records were not produced to link them to the crime. They had also claimed that testimonies of two persons, a relative of the deceased and a neighbour, cannot be relied on, even as they claimed to have seen the accused.
The accused claimed that one of them had not given any proof of being in Kharghar at the time, and that security guards of the building had not been called to depose, to prove that the accused or the witnesses were in the building or their entries and exit were registered in the housing society’s register. The accused also claimed that some key witnesses were not examined.
“To err is human and investigation officer cannot be an exception to that. While appreciating the evidence, certain defects are noticed during investigation, then the court has to consider whether those defects are serious which adversely affect the case of the prosecution. In present case, I do not find that certain defects in the investigation are impacting the case of the prosecution,” the court said.
Story continues below this ad
It relied on testimonies of the various witnesses, including the husband of the deceased, who was at the time working as a civil judge in Malegaon. The court also relied on DNA evidence and recovery of gold ornaments of the deceased from accused Bajwa to convict and sentence the three men to life imprisonment.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd