BHOPAL: Justice was finally delivered to Chandresh Marskole. But it came after a wait of 13 years. More importantly, a promising medical career was cut short by a botched probe in a murder case. Marskole, a native of Balaghat district, will be released from the Bhopal Central Jail after the Madhya Pradesh High Court on Wednesday set aside his life imprisonment while agreeing on his innocence. The tribal man had contested the July 2009 Bhopal court judgment that found him guilty.
In its order, the Jabalpur bench of the MP High Court noted that the case reveals a sordid saga of manipulative and preconceived investigation followed by a malicious prosecution. The police investigated the case with the sole purpose to falsely implicated the MBBS fourth-year student in 2008, it said. ‘‘Perhaps, it (police) deliberately protected prosecution witness Dr Hemant Varma (then a senior resident at the same medical college in Bhopal) who may have been the culprit.’’
The HC ordered the state to pay Rs 42 lakh compensation to Marskole within 90 days of the court’s order, failing which an interest of nine per cent per annum would be imposed till payment. “After his formal arrest on August 25, 2008, the appellant continuously remained in jail, first as an undertrial and thereafter as a convict.
He has wasted over 13 precious years of his life. He was 23 on the date of his arrest and is 36 today. No amount of monetary compensation can ever replenish the period he has lost. He has been a victim of truth being sacrificed at the altar of a motivated and malicious investigation,” reads the order. The bench noted that the indignity, discrimination and oppression faced by backward communities in the state were a “notorious fact”.
The HC was also highly critical of the police and the prosecution. “The police was outrightly partisan. It did not investigate the offence from the standpoint of the appellant at all. We find the police conduct to have been malicious and the investigation was done with the intention of securing the conviction of the appellant for an offence he did not commit and perhaps for shielding Dr Varma,” it added.