Chandigarh: The Punjab and Haryana high court has acquitted a death-row convict in the 2018 murder of a 2.5-year-old child in Haryana’s Hisar district, holding that the prosecution failed to connect the accused as the perpetrator of the crime or produce legally admissible evidence to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt.A division bench of Justice Anoop Chitkara and Justice Harmeet Singh Deol recently set aside the sentencing and conviction of Hem Raj, citing doubts over the victim’s identity, contradictions in witness testimony and deficiencies in alleged recoveries and investigation.A trial court had convicted Hem Raj under Sections 302 (murder) and 201 (disappearance of evidence) of IPC, sentencing him to death along with seven years of rigorous imprisonment. The case arose after the mutilated body of an unidentified child was recovered from a field in Gaibipur village on June 16, 2018. Prosecutors claimed the remains belonged to Siva, a boy who went missing three days earlier.In its judgment, the high court said that DNA profiling of the bone remains failed to yield a sample, leaving the victim’s identity unconfirmed beyond a reasonable doubt. The bench said the body was “most probably Siva’s”, but “the same cannot be said with absolute certainty”. The bench termed the prosecution’s failure to have the child’s mother, Suman, identify clothes recovered near the body as “the most glaring deficiency in the conduct of the trial“.The HC also rejected the prosecution’s reliance on alleged disclosure statements and recovery of the murder weapon, a spade (kassi), from a jowar field. It held that “the making of the disclosure statements, the accused leading the police party to the field, the discovery of kassi, and its connection to the alleged crime were not legally established and did not fall under exceptions to Section 27 of Indian Evidence Act, 1872.”The bench also noted that the Childline record dated June 13, 2018, recorded the alleged perpetrator’s name as “Mahabir”, not the accused, Hem Raj. It said the prosecution never investigated whether Mahabir was an alias of the accused or a different person.“Once it came to the attention of the investigator and his supervisory officers that the person’s name mentioned in the original complaint made to the Childline was ‘Mahabir‘ rather than ‘Hem Raj‘, it was a bare minimum requirement on their part to have carried out an investigation in this regard to ensure that the person whom they had already arrested was not innocent and that the recoveries that had been effected were not unconnected with the crime,” the HC said.The court also considered that while the mother initially implicated Hem Raj in a statement under Section 164 of CrPC, she retracted her claims during trial testimony and absolved him.The court ruled that the burden of proof remained entirely with the prosecution, declaring Hem Raj entitled to the benefit of the doubt. The high court ordered his immediate release on a personal bond, without requiring any surety.
