Orissa High Court acquits two condemned prisoners awarded death penalty for triple murder

The Orissa High Court overturned the lower court’s death sentence of two convicts for allegedly committing the murder of a couple and their minor son and acquitted the three convicts on the ground that “the prosecution has not established its case against them beyond all reasonable doubt”.

The Additional Sessions Judge, Athmallik, on 27 September 2024, awarded capital punishment to Prakash Behera and Nandakishore Sethi after finding the duo guilty of murdering Biranchi Naik, his wife Tarani Naik, and their minor son Ekalabya Naik in Gambharimaliha village under Kishorenagar police station in Angul district.

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The appellants (condemned prisoners) are acquitted of the charges under sections 302/364/201/34 of I.P.C. The appellants, who are in jail custody, shall be set at liberty forthwith if their detention is not required in any other case, a division bench of Justices S K Sahoo and S S Mishra ruled while acquitting the convicts.

“We are conscious that grave and heinous crime has been committed and the culprits, whosoever they may be, have taken away the lives of three persons, including a minor boy and his parents, in an extremely brutal manner, but when there is no satisfactory proof of the guilt of the appellants and that in view of well settled principle of criminal jurisprudence, the Court must always remind itself that more serious the offence, the stricter is the degree of proof and that higher degree of assurance would be necessary to convict an accused, we have no other option but to give the benefit of doubt to the appellants and we are constrained to do so in this case”, the Division Bench stated in the judgment.

”In view of the evidence available on record, we are not in a position to accept that the prosecution has established its case against the appellants beyond all reasonable doubt. The reasoning assigned by the trial Court in convicting the appellants seems to be based on conjecture and suspicion, which has no place in the matter of legal proof of guilt of accused persons in a criminal trial, and we are of the view that the impugned verdict is nothing but a sheer moral conviction. Thus, we hold that the prosecution has failed to establish the charges against the appellants beyond all reasonable doubt,” the judgment concluded.