CHENNAI: When Pasal was arrested by Sub-Inspector Janarthanan for alleged possession of 1.1kg ganja near a low-income settlement in Triplicane, he was 24, Mumbai Indians had just won their first IPL trophy, Manmohan Singh was the Prime Minister and both J Jayalalithaa and M Karunanidhi were alive. By the time he was acquitted last month, Singh had long retired from politics, the two Dravidian leaders are dead, MI had won the IPL five times and Pasal had marked his 34th birthday behind bars.
Eleven years after the D5 Marina Police arrested him, a Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act court in Chennai, on April 24, acquitted him in the 2013 case and a similar case registered in 2019, while slamming the city police for “miserably failing to prove” the crime despite having caught him “red-handed”.
In her judgments, Principal Special Judge C Thirumagal meticulously detailed how the police had botched their investigations in both probes, beginning with their failure to even produce samples of the seized narcotic substance before the court.
While in the 2013 case, police claimed they were unable to produce the samples due to the 2015 Chennai floods, in the 2019 case they claimed the samples went missing when the police station was “shifted to a new building,” the judge noted.
Worse, while Pasal was trapped in prison, the police took five years to file the chargesheet in the 2013 case and 14 months to file it in the 2019, the judgments pointed out, although the law stipulates that chargesheets must be filed within 60 days of arrest.
The judge also noted that glaring errors committed by the cops, lent credence to the defendant’s argument that the 2013 arrest had been pre-planned and the drugs recovered were fake as the FIR number was already on the seizure mahazar when the latter is meant to be prepared at the scene of the crime.
Poking more holes in the police’s already leaky version of events, the judgment further pointed out that the arrest was made by one officer but the report was prepared by a different one.
Curiously, the cops went to the ‘spot’ an hour after receiving a tip-off about the ganja, and the accused’s confession was recorded one hour and 15 minutes after the ‘recovery’ of the contraband, the judgment noted.
Bizarrely, the police took over three hours to travel the 1.5km between the scene of arrest and the police station, the judgment pointed out.
Finally, a fatal legal error committed by the police in both the cases was the failure to obtain signatures of witnesses in the official search notice, a statutory requirement under Section 50 (1) of NDSP Act, the verdicts added.
Despite the double acquittal, Pasal has not yet been released from prison, his counsel told TNIE, as the police have registered yet another case against him.