How to bungle cases in limelight: Tamil Nadu police shows the way

CHENNAI: The conviction rate of the Tamil Nadu police in heinous crimes is nothing to write home about, but their botched investigations of cases that are ‘sensationalised’ in the media have become rather unsavoury.

Case in point is the acquittal of the man convicted of sexually assaulting and killing a seven-year-old girl, which is the latest addition to their museum of failures.

In June 2024, the Madras High Court acquitted all nine accused in the 2013 murder of neurosurgeon SD Subbiah the same year. The court set aside the death sentences against the seven accused, and the life term for the remaining two.

A retired government neurosurgeon, Dr Subbiah was attacked in broad daylight in RA Puram on September 14, 2013. Subbiah, who suffered 27 cuts all across the body, died on September 23 at the private hospital where he worked as a consultant. The case garnered attention as the whole act was ‘caught on a CCTV camera’.

The prosecution’s case was that a civil dispute between the accused persons and the deceased doctor over a 2-acre property in Anjugramam village in Kanniyakumari district was the genesis of the case which ended in a brutal murder. Those convicted and eventually acquitted included a doctor, an advocate, and an engineer.

While setting aside the conviction in the murder case, the Madras High Court noted that the evidence from the prosecution, at best, leads to a grave suspicion of the accused and does not pass the test of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

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“The manner in which the witnesses who overheard minute details in conspiracy meetings, keeping it to themselves for a long time and appearing out of nowhere before the investigating officers, and the manner in which a witness witnessed the money transactions, without any plausible explanation as to how the investigating officer discovered their existence and their knowledge of the facts, the belated recording of their statements, the allegation of bias – all make of this concludes that the finding of guilt cannot be recorded, although, there is a grave suspicion against some of the accused,” the court noted.

Another prominent case that the Tamil Nadu police messed up was the death of a Class 2 student, S Sruthi, who fell through a gaping hole in her school bus on July 25, 2012, when the bus was in motion. In this case, the prosecution did not even get a favourable judgment in the trial court. On January 25, 2023, almost a decade after the incident, a Chengalpattu court declared all the accused, including the Correspondent of the private school, not guilty in Sruthi’s death.

Chennai Police’s Mount Traffic Investigation wing could not prove that there was a hole in the bus and that the stakeholders’ negligence had led to the death of the seven-year-old child. While several witnesses-parents of other students turned hostile jolting the prosecution case, there were also instances of the police bungling their own investigation, which worked against them in court.

One of their Constables deposed that he took photographs of the hole in the bus after the accident on his mobile phone and transferred the images to a Special Sub Inspector Rajendran through bluetooth for taking prints of the photos, before it was burnt down by a mob. But, during cross-examination, Constable Deivasigamani deposed that the model of phone he had was Nokia 3100, which the court noted, did not have a camera facility.

Traffic Inspector Venkatesan, who initially submitted that he took photographs of the hole, said during the cross examination that he did not take any photograph. The then Investigating Officer, Inspector S Dhinakaran did not produce mobile phones in which the photographs of the hole in the bus were allegedly taken, as evidence before the court. His sub-ordinates gave contradictory statements about their presence at the scene of crime after the incident, all of which made the gaping hole larger and larger in the prosecution theory.

“There is no single piece of evidence to prove that the bus had hole on the floor,” Additional District Judge K Kayathri, Chengalpattu, had noted in her judgment.