The Supreme Court on Wednesday said that the process adopted by the Allahabad High Court for reviewing and amending the conviction of three persons is “completely unacceptable”. Along with this, the court rejected the concerned order.
A bench of Justice BR Gavai and Justice Augustine George Christ cited Section 362 of the East Criminal Procedure Code (CRPC) and said that according to the provision, after the provision, after the decision and the final order is signed for the settlement of a case, no court has the right to change or review it apart from recovering a clerical or arithmetic error.
The bench said, “We failed to understand that even in the current case, the High Court made such a mistake despite the use of simple and clear words in the provisions of Section 362 of the CRPC.”
This decision of the Supreme Court has come on separate appeals filed by the complainant of the case challenging the order of the High Court. One accused approached the Supreme Court to acquit.
The bench said that the High Court had rejected the appeals filed by the three accused in its judgment in the case in May 2018. The accused had challenged the order of the lower court before the High Court, in which he was sentenced to life imprisonment, convicting him in a crime of murder under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code.
In February 2019, the High Court amended its decision of May 2018 on the petition of the accused persons and converted their sentence in a low charge under Section 304, Part-2 of the IPC.
Section 304 of IPC is related to Part-two non-Iradatan homicide. After this, the High Court sentenced one of them to 10 years, while the rest were sentenced to five years in jail. The High Court had rejected the arguments of the accused in the May 2018 judgment and confirmed their conviction for the murder.
The Supreme Court said that the High Court had found in its February 2019 order that the incident suddenly seems to be the result of provocation and converted their sentence to part-two of Section 304 of the IPC.
Accepting the appeals filed by the complainant, the bench said, “The decision and order of February 8, 2019 is canceled as it was not appropriate to review its own decision and order given by the High Court on May 21, 2018.” It was revealed that there was a long -term land dispute between the two families and the accused persons attacked a person who died in May 2012.
