SC set aside Telangana HC order convicting two accused in drug case says, the conviction “is illegal on the face of record and suffers from highest degree of perversity”
While hearing the Mohammed Khalid and Another vs. The State of Telangana case on March 01, 2024 (Friday), the Supreme Court (SC) of India criticized the Telangana High Court for confirming the trial court’s order convicting the appellant accused of transporting 80kgs of ganja in a car in 2009. A two-judge bench, Justice BR Gavai, and Justice Sandeep Mehta, acquitted the two accused stating that “...no proceedings under Section 52A of the NDPS Act were undertaken by the Investigating Officer PW-5 for preparing an inventory and obtaining samples in presence of the jurisdictional Magistrate. In this view of the matter, the FSL (Forensic Science Laboratory) report…is nothing but a waste paper and cannot be read in evidence.”
The top Court observed, “It is trite that confession of an accused recorded by a Police Officer is not admissible in evidence as the same is hit by Section 25 of the Evidence Act. Neither the trial Court nor the High Court adverted to this fatal flaw in the prosecution case and proceeded to convict A-3 and A-4 in a sheerly mechanical manner without there being on iota of evidence on record of the case so as to hold them guilty.” Moreover, the bench said “The prosecution has miserably failed to prove the charges against the accused. The evidence of the police witnesses is full of contradictions and is thoroughly unconvincing. The conviction of the accused-appellants as recorded by the trial Court and affirmed by the High Court is illegal on the face of record and suffers from highest degree of perversity.”
In this case, the appeals were filed against the November 10, 2022, order of the Telangana HC confirming the Trial court’s order that convicted the appellants for the offence punishable under Section 8(c) read with Section 20(b)(ii)(c) of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 and sentenced each of them to undergo rigorous imprisonment for ten years and to pay a fine of Rs.1,00,000/- each, in default, to suffer simple imprisonment for six months. The matter was therefore mentioned before the SC bench. The SC found that the inventory of drugs seized was not maintained properly as well as the forensic data was not recorded properly. It said, “Seizure Officer…made no effort whatsoever to conduct a separate weighment of the contraband by segregating the chillies. Rather, the panchnama is totally silent about presence of chillies with the bundles of ganja. Thus, it cannot be said with any degree of certainty that the recovered ganja actually weighed 80 kgs.”
After hearing the contentions of advocates appearing for the State of Telangana, Advocate Kumar Vaibhaw, Advocate Mohd Ashaab, and Devina Sehgal, and for the accused, Senior Advocate C Nageswara Rao, Advocate Vikram Hegde, Advocate Chinmayi Shrivastava, Advocate Tushar Singh, AdvocateChitwan Sharma, Advocate Praseena Elizabeth Joseph, and Advocate Shreeyash Uday Lalit, the SC quashed and set aside the judgment of the Telangana HC and acquitted the appellants of all the charges.
