30 year gap: High Court overturns Sabarimala pilgrim murder conviction, finding ‘memory fades with time’

“What is more significant is that every witness who purported to identify the accused in court was doing so after an interval of nearly three decades. None of them had any sustained or continuing acquaintance with him during the intervening years. Human memory is not infallible; it fades with time and becomes susceptible to suggestion and error. In such circumstances, it would be wholly unsafe to place implicit reliance on dock identification made after the lapse of thirty years, particularly in the absence of any prior test identification parade or other corroborative evidence,” the court said on May 26.

The bench Justices Raja Vijayaraghavan V and K V Jayakumar noted that it was only in February 2019, almost 28 years after the occurrence and nearly 24 years after filing of the final report, that appellant was apprehended and presented as the accused in case.

The bench highlighted that the principal witness relied upon by the prosecution, whose evidence came to be recorded almost thirty years after the occurrence. It added that while analysing his testimony, we have already adverted to the wholly unsatisfactory manner in which his chief examination was conducted.

“Another circumstance that considerably weakens the prosecution’s case is the extraordinary delay in securing the accused. The incident is alleged to have occurred in January 1991. Though the final report was laid in May 1995, the investigating agency had not arrested the accused at any point during the intervening period,” the court noted. It continued that it was only in February 2019, almost 28 years after the occurrence and nearly 24 years after the filing of the final report, that the appellant was apprehended and presented as the accused in the case.

‘Accused not apprehended for years can’t constitute proof of guilt’

• The improbability of such identification becomes even more pronounced when one considers that the appellant who stood in the dock in the year 2020 was no longer the same person whom the witnesses allegedly saw in 1991.
• The inevitable effects of age, passage of time and change in physical appearance render such identification inherently fragile and unreliable.
• The evidence of PW3 and PW10, who are respectively the driver and cleaner of a jeep, illustrates this weakness.
• At the highest, they merely stated that they had seen the accused sitting in a shed on the relevant day.
• Neither of them witnessed any quarrel, assault, robbery or any other incriminating conduct.
• Their testimony does nothing more than establish the presence of a person in the vicinity and falls far short of connecting the accused with the commission of the offences alleged.
• The circumstance that the accused was seen in or near the shed is wholly innocuous and does not implicate him in the commission of murder or robbery.
• The mere fact that the accused was not apprehended for several years cannot, by itself, constitute proof of guilt.
• Abscondence, even if established, is at best a weak circumstance and can never take the place of substantive evidence.

‘No direct evidence links in appellant and homicidal death’

• There is absolutely no direct evidence linking the appellant to the homicidal death of the deceased.
  The witness has claimed to have seen the occurrence or any part thereof.
• The prosecution’s case, therefore, rests entirely on circumstantial evidence and the inferences sought to be drawn therefrom.
• In such cases, it is trite that every circumstance relied upon by the prosecution must be firmly established and all the proved circumstances must form a complete and unbroken chain pointing unerringly to the guilt of the accused and ruling out every reasonable hypothesis consistent with his innocence.
• The public prosecutor repeatedly read out portions of the First Information Statement and obtained affirmative answers from the witness instead of eliciting his independent recollection of events.
• A careful scrutiny of his evidence further reveals numerous omissions, inconsistencies and material departures from his previous version.

• The assertion that he had seen the accused standing near the deceased while returning from Sannidhanam is itself an improvement over his earlier statement.
• The witness on whose alleged disclosure the prosecution’s story was built refused to support the prosecution.
• He did not state that he had witnessed any altercation between the deceased and the accused; nor did he identify the accused as the person responsible for any assault on the deceased.

Case of unsolved murder mystery

The prosecution alleged that on January 19, 1992, the appellant, Muniyandi Raj, murdered Karuthakanna. According to the prosecution, Karuthakannan earned his livelihood by collecting alms from pilgrims visiting Sabarimala and was a native of Uthampalayam Taluk in the State of Tamil Nadu.

The prosecution’s case is that, on that date, Karuthakannan was found seated beside the Nadappatha near Poonkavanam, consuming food from a steel vessel. A sack containing miscellaneous articles, coins, and other belongings, along with another bag, was lying beside him.

It was alleged that the accused approached the deceased and attempted to snatch the sack containing the coins, which resulted in a physical altercation between them, where the accused allegedly struck the victim’s head against a tree and a heavy stone, before robbing him of his belongings.

While the incident occurred in 1991, the appellant remained untraced for years. He was finally arrested in February 2019, nearly 28 years after the alleged crime. In 2021, the trial court found him guilty under Section 302 (murder) and 392 (robbery) of the IPC, sentencing him to life imprisonment.