Mumbai, November 29: Eleven years ago, Ramesh Kakad, a tribal from Thane, was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing his wife Vanjubai by hitting her head with a stone. Prosecution witnesses had told the court that Kakad assaulted her because she could not bear children.
However, all these years after her death, the Bombay High Court has come to the conclusion that the prosecution could not establish that Vanjubai had died a homicidal death, let alone being killed by her husband.
In the absence of a post-mortem report, Justice BH Marlapalle and Justice RY Ganoo were of the view that the trial court should not have convicted Kakad. A chemical analysis report that stated that his clothes had human blood on them, the judges felt, was “irrelevant and inconsequential”.
“Presence of human blood on the clothes of a tribal man is not uncommon, having regard to their way of life and, therefore, these chemical analysis reports by themselves do not support the prosecution case,” the judges said in their order and directed Kakad’s release from prison.
Kakad, a resident of the Talasari taluka in Thane, was married to Vanjubai in 1988. On August 27, 1998, Vanjubai’s sister-in-law Sakhu, who lived a kilometre away from Kakad’s house, learnt of Vanjubai’s death. She told the court that a day earlier, Kakad had abused and assaulted her as she had not borne his child and even threatened to kill her.
The police came to the crime scene at 5pm on the same day and after recording statements of Vanjubai’s father and Sakhu, an FIR was registered on July 29, 1998. Kakad was arrested on September 13, 1998.
The high court took serious note of the autopsy report that was never brought on record by the police and that the medical officer who conducted the post-mortem was never examined as a witness during the trial. “There was no evidence available before the trial court which could be relied on to hold that Vanjubai died an unnatural death and further, that it was a homicidal death,” the high court concluded.
–Agencies–