CHENNAI: A few kilometres west of the Chennai international airport, Madhanandhapuram is just another quiet locality of regular middle-class families of IT employees and government servants engaged in their daily routines without courting attention.
Eight years ago, a two-storey apartment block at the dead-end of a narrow lane in the area suddenly gained infamy when a seven-year-old girl living there went missing and was later found dead. She was raped and murdered, police said, by a neighbour she called ‘anna’– a 22-year-old youth residents remember as the lanky boy who walked his dog on the street every day.
Overturning the 2018 Madras High Court and Chengalpattu district court judgments which convicted and sentenced Dashwanth to death, the SC freed him, saying the Mangadu police, which investigated the case – with inspectors N Ravikumar (until April 21, 2017) and RD Vivekanandan (from April 22, 2017) as investigating officers – had bungled up so badly that acquittal was the only choice.
Two days after the verdict, a visit by TNIE to Madhanandhapuram found many residents living here in 2017 had moved out. Dashwanth’s apartment was locked, with metal grilles gathering rust and a bank notice demanding unpaid loan dues pasted on the wall collecting dust. A family living in what was then the victim’s apartment has little idea about the incident and requested to be left alone.
For old-timers though, the verdict brought back unpleasant memories they had chosen to forget. Everyone is united in shock and astonishment at the verdict.
VS Sreedharan (86) remembers Dashwanth’s family well. “His mother looked so gentle. She always has vibhuti (sacred ash) on her head,” he says, unaware that she too was murdered, and the alleged perpetrator, her son, was acquitted by the trial court citing another shoddy probe by the police.
Recalling the fateful evening of February 5, 2017, when the entire apartment complex joined in a frantic search for the girl after her parents couldn’t locate her, Sreedharan adds, “The whole building was out searching that night. When we heard that she was murdered, there was not even a single person who had not cried.”
TNIE also caught up with the person, who in 2017 was an administrator of Shri Karpaga Vinayagar temple, located near the apartment and saw the CCTV footage of the temple. He was Prosecution Witness(PW)-6 in the trial, as the spotting of a man riding motorbike with a bag, which supposedly had the body of the girl, was used by the prosecution to build the case.
A crucial point considered by the Supreme Court to acquit Dashwanth was how the police never produced as evidence the temple’s CCTV footage. There are several inconsistencies in this piece of evidence; for instance, while the victim’s father says the police informed him about the footage, the temple administrator testified that the former had seen it a day before the policemen. Either way, the temple administrator told the police that the person’s face was not visible in the footage.
Curiously, both the Madras High Court and the trial court were informed that the CCTV footage was not marked as evidence exactly for this reason – it did not give any clue on the identity of the accused. Despite this, both courts opined that this was not detrimental to the prosecution’s case.
In addition to the CCTV fiasco, the other investigative lapses highlighted by the SC were apparent to K Rajkumar, the counsel from state legal aid who defended Dashwanth in the trial court after the charges were framed in December 2017. “There were major flaws in the identification parade, the CCTV footage recovery, and the eyewitness testimony. These were fundamental mistakes by the investigation team,” he told TNIE, recalling how he was forced to take up the case despite opposition from his own family members.
The eyewitness testimony Rajkumar referred to is that of Murugan, alias Venkata Murugan Guna, who claimed he saw the girl playing with Dashwanth and his dog before she went missing. This helped the police come up with the ‘last seen’ theory and get him convicted by the trial court.
The flaw Rajkumar refers to is that Murugan’s testimony on this aspect was recorded two months after the incident by new IO Vivekanandan. SC noted this as a major lapse and a “sheer concoction, bereft of credibility,” since this vital information, if it was indeed true, was not found in the complaint reported to the police on the day of the crime.
Curiously, the Madras High Court also deliberated on this contradiction but did not view it as a fatal infirmity. This is not the only evidence the prosecution relied on, the court said. Instead, the court blamed Dashwanth’s counsel for not raising it during the cross examination. Additionally, they supported the theory that the police may not have recorded Murugan’s statement earlier as the accused was also helping them look for the victim.
The SC verdict also raised questions on whether the prosecution was able to conclusively prove that Dashwanth raped the victim. Semen on the victim’s underwear found in a bag purportedly carried by the accused was matched with DNA from his blood sample. But the latter was collected four months after the crime. This led the SC to question if the samples were tampered with; their doubt was based on the testimony of a forensic expert that semen biocells survive only 48 hours after release from the body.
Conversely, all it took the high court to uphold the trial court conviction on the rape charges was the “compelling” evidence that Dashwanth watched porn on his phone. There was no documentary evidence given to show that the SIM card in the phone belonged to the accused. For instance, no call data record (CDR) was obtained by the police – loophole that the SC pointed out. Interestingly, the CDR could have punched holes in the prosecution theory that Dashwanth was absconding after killing the victim, whereas he testified being at his office.
Both lower courts were convinced by the theory of semen on the victim’s underwear as evidence, but did not question the chain of custody of evidence detailing how it was handled and documented from the moment it was collected until it was sent for testing and later presented in the court. The Supreme Court found serious lapses in this.
Father shattered
Speaking to TNIE over phone, the girl’s father said he was hoping against hope that the apex court would not acquit him. The turmoil caused by the unbearable loss of the girl and its aftermath resulted in the family falling apart with the father living separately from the mother and their younger son.
Recalling the support offered to the family by the police after the incident and during the trial, he said he did what the police asked him to do, hoping that they were doing their job right.
Until the case went to Supreme Court where it began to unravel, he said he did not have reason to suspect that the investigation had so many lapses. “This judgment has completely shaken me,” he said
Way forward
Vidya Reddy of Tulir - Centre for Prevention and Healing of Child Sexual Abuse said she hoped that there is introspection in the criminal justice system instead of outraging about the SC’s verdict. “This should be a point of reckoning,” she said.
She emphasised that a critical aspect for improvement is orienting the police officers in supervisory ranks about procedural compliances, particularly when it comes to Pocso and Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Acts. “Unfortunately all training is only directed at those in the lower ranks. Queries from junior officers are often met with bluster and hostility by their superiors since they don’t want to show their lack of knowledge exposed,” she said.
S Radhakrishnan, a retired principal of a Police Training School, who trains in-service officers now, says,“Police training schools in Tamil Nadu cover almost every aspect of investigation. The question is, why isn’t that training reflected on the ground,” adding that this reflected the entrenched systemic issues. He added officers at different levels seldom review the chargesheet or the evidence-handling process thoroughly. “The additional director of prosecution is supposed to examine the entire chargesheet diligently,” he says. Moreover, he said the pressure to maintain a high conviction rate while handling law-and-order issues in parallel often took away the focus of the officers from being rigorous in investigation.
Sources in the Department of Forensic Sciences said the police personnel often displayed lack of proper training in identifying the necessary materials that need to be sent for forensic examination, even in Pocso cases. One of the officials said, in Pocso cases, the clothes of the survivor and the accused are sent as a routine procedure, irrespective of whether they are needed or not in the respective cases.
V Suresh, advocate and national general secretary, People’s Union for Civil Liberties, stressed the need to make those involved in the botched-up investigation in these two cases accountable.
(With inputs from Subashini Vijayakumar)
