The Supreme Court on Tuesday, January 28, acquitted a man sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman hailing from Machilipatnam, Andhra Pradesh. Setting aside the judgement of the Bombay High Court, which had convicted Chandrabhan Sanap, the SC acquitted him of all charges on the grounds that the prosecution relied solely on ‘circumstantial evidence’ and that there existed reasonable doubt about his culpability.
TNM reached out to the father of the victim, now a resident of Guntur. “We hadn’t asked for the death penalty. We were hoping justice would be served. A man like him (referring to the accused) should not be out in society,” the victim’s father, Singavarapu Jonathan Surendra Prasad, told TNM. Surendra Prasad added that the Maharashtra police and the government took a lot of care in gathering evidence as part of the investigation.
The 23-year-old techie was staying in the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in Mumbai and had travelled to Machilipatnam in the last week of December 2013. While she boarded the train back on January 4, 2014, she was not heard from after the train reached Mumbai on January 5. Her burnt and decomposed body was found on January 16. The victim’s body was identified by her father based on a ring on her finger.
“I am over 70 years of age. I now want to live peacefully. I am not in a position to fight this case again and I have another daughter to take care of. If my elder daughter (the deceased) were alive, I would have fought for her. But she isn’t and I don’t have the wherewithal to go through this again,” Surendra Prasad added.
A bench of Justices BR Gavai, Prashant Kumar Mishra, and KV Viswanathan held that the facts cumulatively led to the conclusion that there were "gaping holes" in the prosecution's story. There were a total of 14 circumstances relied upon by the Bombay High Court to sustain a conviction and sentence the accused. The Supreme Court addressed circumstances 6 to 13, which concerned the grounds of criminal appeal, including the inadmissibility of the CCTV footage, as the prosecution had not furnished Section 65-B(4) (statement that confirms the authenticity of electronic evidence) certificate under the Indian Evidence Act.
