New Delhi: Pointing out that CBI’s case against former CM Arvind Kejriwal rested mainly on the statement of accused-turned-approver Magunta Reddy, the special court on Friday questioned if probe agencies can “elevate” and treat such statements as “unimpeachable truth”.Special judge Jitendra Singh took a dim view of CBI’s move to record multiple statements of another approver, Dinesh Arora, saying “it carries the grave potentiaof setting an unhealthy precedent”. If permitted, such a practice will “effectively normalise a method whereby an investigating agency, after securing pardon on the professed premise of a ‘full and true disclosure’, continues to repeatedly re-record statements of the approver over an extended period, ostensibly to fill gaps, improve the prosecution narrative, implicate additional accused, or artificially weave missing links in the chain of circumstances”.
It highlighted that CBI offered no explanation as to why it found it necessary to record the statement of the approver under Section 161 of CrPC repeatedly, and that too over a span of nearly one and a half years, extending till the filing of the last supplementary chargesheet.“This unexplained conduct reflects a disturbing departure from the settled legal principles governing the grant of pardon,” it observed after the defence lawyers brought out the manner in which the testimony of Arora was recorded several times and only then was he granted pardon from prosecution.Singh noted that it was a settled principle of criminal jurisprudence that the statement of an approver was inherently suspect and was to be received with great caution. “Yet, the statements of the approver were elevated and treated as though they constitute unimpeachable truth, and were uncritically incorporated as relied-upon material forming the backbone of the prosecution case.” A probe that “departs from transparency, consistency and procedural discipline, particularly by repeatedly re-recording statements of an approver after the grant of pardon without any disclosed justification does not merely affect evidentiary appreciation, but strikes at the heart of these constitutional and international guarantees”, it cautioned.
