9911796707
TMI Blog1952 (11) TMI 14X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... ced to transportation for life. All of them appealed to the High Court and were acquitted. A petition for enhancement of sentence of Kishanrao and Shaligram preferred by the State was dismissed. 2. The deceased, Dattu Patel, was a resident of Taroda, district Wardha and at the time of the incident he was residing in the house of Virendra Malviya, P. W. 27, at Ganjapeth, Nagpur. It is alleged that he was a friend of Limsey and used to visit him from time to time and consult him regarding his domestic troubles, that he and a few others were in the habit of smoking ganja and drinking liquor at the house of Limsey and that for some time prior to the date of the occurrence relations between him and Limsey had become very strained. Dattu had complained to Virendra Malviya that Limsey had swallowed thousands of rupees from him and that he was an associate of thieves, and gets thefts committed by others and shares the booty with them. Limsey in his turn had accused Dattu of defaming him and had threatened that if Dattu did not stop his defamatory propaganda he may go to the length of killing him. On 8-10-1949 Limsey wrote to Dattu to come and meet him that day. The letter is in these te ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... dying of heart failure. I scolded them and it seems they and others deliberately wanted to dispose of the body in the manner they have done. I am innocent. Accused 3, Shaligram, denied having had anything to do with the incident. His plea in defence was: I am innocent. I do not know how Dattu Patel came to die or how his body came to be buried. Ganpat had laid this charge against me falsely as he knew that I knew what he had done with the cycle parts. In support of his plea of alibi Limsey made a detailed statement according to which he left Nagpur on the afternoon of the 8th for Amaravati and before Dattu had come to his house and did not return to Nagpur till after his surrender at Benares on the 16th. The plea of alibi was not accepted in the two courts below and was not seriously pressed before us and it must, therefore, be held that it was untrue. There is evidence on the record that up to the evening of the 11th and before a search warrant was issued on the 12th Limsey was at his house where the dead body of Dattu Patel had been entombed. In the absence of any evidence that Limsey had left his house, it has, in the ordinary course of events, to be presumed that h ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... l death or the fact that his death was due to violence ......People react in different ways to situations of this kind, and so far as we can gather from the exiguous material on record, no previous preparations were made for the entombment of the corpse in the loft of Limsey's house. The decision to that effect was apparently reached after his death and the same would apply to the plan whereby the bicycle was dismembered and its parts were concealed in various places. Hidayatullah J. who also in a separate judgment concurred with the judgment delivered by the learned Acting Chief Justice, expressed his conclusion in these words: I am quite clear in my mind that this case fails because the result of the autopsy was inconclusive. Whether this was due to putrefaction or some other cause is little to purpose. The police did not care to have another examination done. We cannot speculate about the cause of death and cannot, on the materials furnished, hold that the death of Dattu was from violence. Once that conclusion is not reached, the acquittal of the accused in the case must inevitably follow. 5. As above stated, this appeal is before us by special leave. Article 134 ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... by the High Court if we were hearing the appeal there. It cannot, however, be positively said that the conclusion reached by the High Court is, in any way, perverse or improper or that on the facts found the only conclusion that could possibly be reached In the case was that the crime had been committed by the accused. In our judgment, therefore, this appeal must fail. (After briefly examining the evidence the Supreme Court reached the conclusion that there was no direct evidence in the case of the murder of Dattu Patel, or of the participation of the respondents in it). 7. The learned Advocate General for the State contended that the High Court should have concluded from the circumstantial evidence that the death of Dattu was brought about by foul play and was not a natural one. He urged that Dattu's body could not have been entombed in Limsey's house without his consent or permission and as a matter of fact he must have been responsible for it, that in the absence of any satisfactory explanation as to why he took such an extraordinary step, it should have been concluded that he did so in order to destroy evidence of his criminal act, that if the death had been due to ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... ttu was murdered. The strongest weapon in the armoury of the learned Advocate-General is the existence of a freshly constructed tomb in the loft of Limsey's house wherein the dead body of Dattu was entombed. The conduct of Limsey in constructing Dattu's tomb in the third storey of his house more or less verges on lunacy and is not conclusive evidence of the fact that Dattu had been murdered by him, though it raises a very strong suspicion against him. The High Court was dealing with the case of a person whose mind was so perverted that he could not see that such conduct on his part would surely recoil on himself and be the strongest proof against his innocence. The possibility, therefore, cannot be ruled out that he may have acted in a similar way in case he wanted to conceal for reasons of his own, the death of a person brought about by natural causes in his house. It is not difficult to visualize that Dattu died a natural but sudden death and in a moment of panic and confusion Limsey conceived the idea of concealing his death by entombing him in his own house. There are no such circumstances that militate against the theory that Dattu might have died of alcoholic po ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X
|
