India’s Supreme Court has released three men who eight years ago were sentenced to death for the 2012 rape, torture and murder of a 19-year-old girl in New Delhi after raising doubts about the investigation that was conducted and the alleged involvement of these three people.
The three Supreme Court judges who heard the case on Monday held that there was negligence on the part of the police during the investigation as well as during the trial that sentenced the three to death in 2014.
The alleged contradictions that occurred during the investigation are sufficient, the judges have said, to give the benefit of the doubt to these three men, one of whom acknowledged his participation and incriminated the other two, as recalled by the ABP News TV channel.
However, the judges argue that the evidence must be indisputable to convict someone and that there were also «flagrant failures» in the previous trial, in which the magistrate acted as a «passive arbiter».
According to the ruling, the identity of the three accused was not properly established, none of the witnesses in the previous trial were able to place them at the scene, nor could any of the evidence presented be credited. «The court is left with no alternative but to acquit the accused, even though they are involved in such a heinous crime,» he justified, details the daily ‘Indian Express’.
The case dates back to February 2012 when the young girl named Anamika was abducted in the Chhawla neighborhood of New Delhi. Raped and murdered, three days later her body was found with visible marks of having suffered various tortures.
