Orissa HC attacks CBI after Dara reprieve

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal" style="" text-align:="" justify="">CUTTACK: The Orissa High Court has severely indicted the premier investigating agency of the country, CBI, over the tainted evidences of criminal conspiracy it had adduced against all the accused persons in the sensational 1999 January Staines triple murder case. The HC has also expressed surprise that how the lower court which convicted as many as 13 persons including the prime accused Dara Singh, relied upon the weak and speculative evidences the prosecution (CBI) made before the trial court.<br /><br />A look into the 106-page judgment that was passed by the HC on Thursday gives ample credence that the CBI had miserably failed in handling this sensational case as a result as many as 11 innocent, meek and mild tribal persons were put behind the bars for more than six years without any fault of theirs.<br /><br />The HC gave a major relief to Dara Singh on Thursday while quashing the death sentence awarded to him by a lower court in September 2003.It however, maintaining the conviction judgment of the lower court upheld Dara''s life sentence along with another co-accused Mahendra Hembram. The remarkable judgment also acquitted all other 11 accused in the case who were convicted and sentenced lifers by the lower court since charges against them have not been proved beyond reasonable doubt.<br /><br />The HC had repeatedly observed in its judgment that the evidences both made by the eye-witnesses and the evidences adduced by CBI to prove the conspiracy angle were weak and speculative, which cannot be relied upon.<br /><br />In Page 26 of the judgment, the HC observed...<br /></div> </div><div class="section2"><div class="Normal" style="" text-align:="" justify="">... that "we are constrained to observe that it was absolutely unfair and unethical on the part of the over zealous CBI investigating officers to adopt such unheard of methods to procure tainted evidence to somehow procure conviction of appellants (accused)". The HC further observed in the same page that: "Trial court was also astonishingly over credulous to act upon such evidence".<br /><br />The prosecution in total examined at least 55 witnesses out of which 11 were examined as eye-witnesses. The HC discussing each of the eye-witnesses individually was of the opinion that ''there was no corroboration in identification of the accused in the trial court as well as in the TI parade. All the evidences suffer from the same defect and they were inadmissible", the court observed.<br /><br />The court said that ''the evidences of many prosecution witnesses were recorded long after the occurrence of the incident. While there was no test identification (TI) parade held, the judicial magistrate was neither requested to hold TI parade of photographs of the suspects. Such lapses on the part of an elite investigating agency like CBI cannot be excused", the court felt. <br /></div> </div>