SC cautions over evidence
As allegations of abetment to suicide has become a common practice these days with people leading stressful life, the Supreme Court in an important judgement has a world of caution to the trial courts regarding handling such cases with utmost care and not to take the suicide statements merely on their face value.
Since a person could be awarded punishment up to 10 years of imprisonment under Section 306 of the IPC for abetting suicide, the apex court said in view of the seriousness of the charge, the allegations must be supported with concrete action or words spoken, not merely based on hearsay statements.
“It would have to be objectively seen whether the allegations (of abetment to suicide) made could reasonably be viewed, as proper allegations against the accused to the effect that he had intended or engineered the suicide of the concerned person by his acts, words etc,” a bench of Justices V.S. Sirpurkar and Cyrica Joseph ruled.
“The baseless and irrelevant allegations could not be used as a basis for prosecution for a serious offence under section 306 of the IPC,” the apex court said.
The top court explained that a person merely having grudge against another person and committed suicide on account of that grudge, and even “honestly” felt that he had been “wronged”, still it would not be a proper allegation for basing the charge under Section 306 of the IPC.
On the question of “suicide notes” which often were made the basis for launching the prosecution, the top court said they could not be “depicted” as expressing anything intentional on the part of the accused.
The ruling came on an appeal by BSNL Ahmedabad-based divisional engineer telecom Madan Mohan Singh, who was charged with abetting the suicide of his driver D.K. Joshi.
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