Father-in-law of dalit victim acquitted in Tamil Nadu caste murder case

CHENNAI: Four years and a quarter after the caste killing of dalit youth Shankar in Udumalpet, TN, the first-accused Chinnaswamy escaped the noose when the Madras high court acquitted him of all charges on Monday. He was among six men facing death penalty for the murder and the near-fatal injuries suffered by his own 19-year-old daughter Kaushalya.
In its 311-page judgment, the court also refused to overturn the trial court’s order acquitting Chinnaswamy’s wife Annalakshmi and brother-in-law Pandithurai. With this, all three main suspects — Kaushalya’s parents and maternal uncle — are free now.
The division bench of Justice M Sathyanarayanan and Justice M Nirmal Kumar also commuted the death penalty of five others into life imprisonment, but made it clear that they have to serve a minimum of 25 years of imprisonment without any benefit of early release.A dissatisfied Kaushalya has said she would take the case to the Supreme Court on appeal, and that she would not rest till her parents – Chinnaswamy and Annalakshmi – were punished. “If they were not party to the murder, Shankar would not have died at all,” she told reporters, minutes after the verdict.
Shankar and Kausalya got to know each other while they were studying in a private engineering college in Pollachi, and married against the wishes of her parents. On March 13, 2016, a gang hacked the couple in broad daylight at Udumalpet in Tirupur district. While Shankar suffered 32 cuts and died, Kausalya survived the attack.
On December 12, 2017, the Tirupur district sessions court sentenced six people, including Chinnaswamy, to death, and acquitted Annalakshmi and Pandithurai among others. The high court heard appeals from both sides.
The court said the prosecution had failed to provide the chain of circumstances linking Chinnaswamy’s connection to the actual assailants, and pointed out that the prosecution theories like he had made arrangements for their stay, that he withdrew money from an ATM to pay the assailants and that he met some of them at a party to discuss the murder plan were not proved beyond reasonable doubt.
The court pointed out police had failed to secure even CCTV footage of the ATM from where Chinnaswamy allegedly withdrew money that was paid to the assailants. Since criminal conspiracy was not proved, he was also acquitted from charges of murder as well.
This apart, the court upheld the acquittal of Kaushalya’s mother Annalakshmi and maternal uncle Pandithurai as well, saying it did not find any error in the trial court finding that there was nothing to connect Annalakshmi to the murder, and that Kaushalya’s statement with regard to Pandithurai was not believable. There was no evidence to prove that he did a recce by visiting the neighbourhood where the young couple lived post-wedding.
In respect of the five actual assailants, the court had enough scientific and electronic evidence, besides clinching eyewitness accounts. Also, Kaushalya’s deposition too swung the case the prosecution way. The judges pointed out that she was an injured witness, and added: “There is no rhyme or reason to discredit the testimony of Kaushalya, an injured witness, who also survived the fatal attack in the form of sustainment of grievous injuries…The death of her life partner as well as the near-death experience by her, would be remembered by her for a long time and as such, her testimony cannot be brushed aside though there are some discrepancies in her evidence.”
However, citing the young age and absence of criminal antecedents of the five condemned people —Jagathesan, Manikandan, Selvakumar, Kalaitamilvanan alias Tamil alias Kalai, and Madan alias Michael — to spare them the noose, the bench said: “The accused are all of young age and none of them have any serious bad antecedents except Jagatheesan and Madan, who faced prosecution for a non-cognizable and bailable offence. This court is of the considered view that there is every possibility that they would reform themselves and, on their release, would contribute something useful to the society.”