The Supreme Court of India

INDIA: SUPREME COURT FREES MAN SENTENCED TO DEATH IN 2013 RAPE-MURDER CASE

May 20, 2025:

The Supreme Court of India has acquitted a man accused of raping and murdering a child in 2013 in Maharashtra’s Thane, citing the probe agency’s “shabby investigation” and the “overzealous” approach of the court that sentenced him, First Post reported on May 20, 2025.
The top court ruled there was “nothing to even cast a minimal suspicion” against the man that he was involved in the case before the Bombay High Court sentenced him.
A bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath, Sanjay Karol, and Sandeep Mehta stated that the prosecution’s case in the brutal rape and murder of the child collapsed due to a flawed and compromised investigation. Despite the lack of credible evidence, the accused was convicted and sentenced by the courts. The bench also noted that witnesses had been fabricated to “pad” the case.
“Despite the shabby investigation, the overzealous approach of the courts below to impart justice, in a sense that someone must be held responsible for the crime, has led to the conviction of the appellant herein, who was a young man aged about 25 years at the time of the incident and has remained incarcerated for more than 12 years with the Damocles’ sword of impending death penalty hanging over his head for more than six years,” the bench said.
The incident began in September 2013 when a young girl went missing, and her body was found three days later. The suspect was apprehended the next day. With no eyewitnesses to the crime, the prosecution built its case entirely on circumstantial evidence. In 2019, the accused was found guilty and handed a death sentence.
“Upon an overall appreciation of the evidence of the two investigating officers and the witnesses of the last seen theory and also the sole witness of extra-judicial confession, we are convinced that the entire sequence of events narrated by these witnesses is unreliable and unbelievable. It is clearly a case of concocted depositions secured by the prosecuting agency by way of padding so as to fasten the guilt of this heinous crime on the accused and thereby lay a claim to have solved the case,” the bench added.