Allahabad High Court frees 3 life convicts after 38 years, calls case a ‘blind murder’

Nearly four decades after they were sentenced to life imprisonment, the Allahabad High Court has acquitted three men in a 1982 murder case, holding that they were punished for a “blind murder” committed by unknown assailants and that the prosecution’s case rested on conjectures rather than proof.

A bench of Justices Sanjiv Kumar and J J Munir recently set aside the 1987 conviction of Amrit Lal, Harish Chandra and Kallu, observing that the evidence on record failed to establish their guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Eight other co-accused, also sentenced to life, died during the pendency of the proceedings.

“It was a blind murder and the deceased was murdered by someone else, in the dark hours of night, away from the abadi of the village,” the court said in its December 18 verdict, adding that the trial court had reached a “wrong conclusion” by improperly appreciating the evidence.

The case related to the killing of Ram Dulare, whose body was found near a railway line in Bhadri village of Prayagraj on July 8, 1982. The prosecution alleged that 11 villagers assaulted him with lathis, kicks and punches, and that one accused inserted a lathi into his rectum, causing his death. An FIR was registered the same morning, and all 11 were convicted after trial.

Hearing the appeals of the three surviving convicts, the high court found glaring inconsistencies between medical and ocular evidence. The post-mortem attributed death to a head injury and recorded no injury of the nature described by eyewitnesses. “The medical evidence completely rules out the direct evidence of eye-witnesses,” the bench held, noting that such contradictions struck at the very root of the prosecution’s case.

The court also questioned the credibility of the eyewitnesses, both close relatives of the deceased, pointing out that the alleged assault took place in the dead of night, far from habitation and without any reliable source of light. It flagged unexplained conduct, inconsistencies in the FIR regarding its timing and place of registration, and the failure to examine independent village witnesses.

Terming the prosecution’s narrative “highly unnatural”, the bench observed that accepting it would mean 11 assailants beat the victim for nearly an hour but caused only 10 injuries—an assertion it found implausible.

Concluding that the killing occurred under the cover of darkness and that the prosecution had “utterly failed” to prove its case, the high court allowed the appeals, acquitted the three men and ordered their immediate release, subject to execution of personal bonds in case the state challenges the verdict.