CUTTACK: The Orissa High Court has acquitted a woman who was sentenced by a trial court to life imprisonment after finding her guilty of committing murder of her husband 15 years back.
Laulina Achariya of Barupoda under Rajgangpur police station was put on trial on the basis of the case registered after she turned up at the Sundargarh town police station and stated that she had committed the murder of her husband Surendra Bag on May 28, 2007. She was then 25 years old.
Police detected the body of the deceased lying inside the room covered with a blanket with profuse bleeding injury and recovered an axe from the spot.
The court of sessions judge (Sundargarh) sentenced her to life imprisonment on July 3, 2009. She filed an appeal in the high court the same year.
Arguing on Laulina’s behalf, advocate Jeevan Ranjan Dash submitted that the conviction and sentence awarded by the trial court are liable to be set aside as the chain of circumstance is not at all complete so far as guilt of the accused is concerned, and she has been found guilty on preponderance of probability.
Setting aside the conviction, the bench of Justice Debabrata Dash and Justice V Narasingh observed that on in-depth analysis of the evidence on record it was “unable to persuade itself to arrive at a hypothesis that only the accused is the author of the crime.”