New Delhi: It’s a case the place each the accused and the survivor ended as victims of the justice supply system as injustice was completed to the previous who needed to spend 13 years in jail for a criminal offense he didn’t commit, whereas the latter was denied justice as the true perpetrator of sexual assault on her when she was 4 years previous was not dropped at ebook.Noting that the police performed a “hopelessly botched investigation” and cooked up a narrative towards the accused to guard the true offender, and decrease courts mechanically accepted the prosecution’s model and did not unveil the reality, an SC bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta acquitted the accused within the case of sexual assault of a woman in Godhra in 2013.The reduction got here after the accused, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by trial court docket and Gujarat HC, had spent 13 years in jail.gujarat police Hopelessly botched probe that obscured, quite than unveiled, the reality: SCThis court docket can not stay oblivious to the sobering actuality that such dealing with of prison circumstances leaves scars not merely upon the people concerned however upon the justice system itself. When investigations are carried out in a way that betrays their foundational function, and trials change into mechanical workout routines divorced from the search for fact, the ensuing miscarriage of justice reverberates far past the confines of the courtroom. It erodes public religion, instils uncertainty in victims, and sends a chilling message to society at massive that the pursuit of justice might falter not on the altar of complexity however by the hands of indifference. The prison regulation, which should stand as a bulwark defending the weak, dangers turning into an instrument of unintended cruelty when procedural lapses and institutional negligence overshadow substantive justice,” the SC bench stated.It expressed deep concern over the best way wherein Gujarat police performed the probe. After inspecting the statements of varied witnesses, the court docket got here to conclusion that the complete story implicating the accused for the crime was cooked up after consultations and deliberations on the day after to the incident. The impact of this grave embellishment on the prosecution case was not thought-about within the right perspective both by the trial court docket or HC, the bench stated.“A grave and distressing case of brutal sexual assault upon a four-year previous woman stands earlier than this court docket, enveloped in layers of investigative apathy and procedural infirmities. The FIR, regardless of the informant’s professed full data of the incident, is bereft of even essentially the most rudimentary particulars, neither the title of the accused particular person (appellant herein) nor these of the purported witnesses of the final seen collectively circumstance discover point out. What adopted was an investigation hopelessly botched and a trial performed with a pedantic rigidity that obscured, quite than unveiled, the reality. The extremely unnatural conduct of the witnesses, marked by gross insensitivity/rank apathy, contradictions and obvious concoctions raises severe doubts in regards to the reliability of the prosecution’s case. But, in face of this disturbing matrix, the accused stands convicted and has remained behind bars for almost 13 lengthy years,” it stated.The court docket stated the investigating officer did not safe and protect essential forensic materials which might have supplied goal corroboration and assisted in ascertaining the reality. It stated the failure not solely weakens the prosecution’s case but in addition raises a reputable apprehension that the investigation might not have been carried out with the requisite equity and diligence and the chance that “such inaction was meant, or at the least operated, to defend the precise perpetrators of the offense can’t be dominated out”.