A man who was ordered to be hanged by two courts (sessions court and Allahabad High Court) for the 2012 rape and murder of a six-year-old girl in Uttar Pradesh was acquitted by a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court on 28th September, after spending 10 years in jail.
The bench also came down hard on the police for its carelessness and improper investigation and on the two courts – the sessions court which sentenced him to death and the Allahabad high court which confirmed the capital punishment.

The bench said the rape and murder of the six-year-old girl was undoubtedly “ghastly” but the prosecution had done great injustice to the appellant by declaring him guilty “without any shred of evidence which will stand scrutiny”.

The bench of justices S Abdul Nazeer, AS Bopanna and V Ramasubramanian said “Court cannot make someone a victim of injustice, to compensate for the injustice to the victim of a crime,”

Chotkau, a man from UP’s Shravasti district, told the top court that he was innocent and was framed for the murder on March 8, 2012, by the village head’s husband, who was his relative. He did so because he was trying to capture his mother’s property.
The top court also noted that Chotkau was so poor that he could not even afford a lawyer for the trial. It was only after repeated requests that the trial judge agreed to provide him services of a lawyer to assist the court as amicus curiae.

The trial court eventually sentenced him to death in March 2014, a verdict that was confirmed by the Allahabad high court in April 2016.

Chotkau’s case came to the notice of retired high court judge S Nagamuthu who argued for him in the top court and exposed the contradictions in the prosecution case. The bench then outlined several discrepancies in the prosecution case.

The three-judge bench underlined that the failure of the prosecution to produce such evidence “will certainly create a gaping hole in the case of the prosecution and give rise to a serious doubt on the case of the prosecution”

The top court even found that there were contradictions in the statements given by the witnesses presented by the police. The witnesses contradicted their initial version during their cross examination and differed on material aspects of the case regarding lodging of FIR, location of the dead body, place of the inquest, and description of clothes worn by the victim.

“Unfortunately, the sessions court, as well as the high court, have trivialized these major contradictions to hold that the chain of circumstances has been established unbroken,” the bench said.

“When we analyse the evidence with such a sense of responsibility, we are not convinced that the guilt of the appellant stood established beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The court set aside the imprisonment and death sentence and Chotkau was ordered to be released immediately.