The Allahabad High Court’s acquittal of Rajesh Talwar and Nupur Talwar nearly four years after their imprisonment for the murder of their only daughter and their domestic worker raises disturbing questions about the quality of criminal investigation and trial in the case.
Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, the dentist couple who in 2013 were sentenced by a trial court to rigorous imprisonment for the murder of their only daughter, the teen aged Aarushi, and the family’s domestic worker, Hemraj, walked out free from Dasna Jail in Ghaziabad on October 16. The Allahabad High Court on October 12 allowed their appeals against the trial court verdict and acquitted both.
The prosecution, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), had treated the murder as an honour crime and charged the Talwars for killing Aarushi and Hemraj, allegedly after witnessing them indulging in sexual intercourse in Aarushi’s bedroom in the intervening night of May 15-16, 2008.
The Allahabad High Court bench of Justices Bala Krishna Narayana and Arvind Kumar Mishra found the CBI’s theory absurd and weak and the trial court’s reasoning full of erroneous assumptions. The High Court found clinching evidence pointing to the presence of outsiders in the Talwars’ residence on the fateful night.
CENSURE FOR TRIAL COURT JUDGE
It indicted the trial court judge in Ghaziabad, Shyam Lal, for the style and approach of his judgment. Shyam Lal had delivered the judgment in the case shortly before his retirement. “Like a film director, the trial judge has tried to thrust coherence amongst facts inalienably scattered here and there, but not giving any coherence to the idea as to what in fact happened,” the High Court observed.
As the case against the Talwars relied only on circumstantial evidence, the motive was very significant. The trial court accepted the CBI’s theory that catching Hemraj in an act of sexual intercourse with Aarushi in her bedroom provided grave and sudden provocation to her parents, who murdered both by assaulting them with a golf club and slitting their throats with a surgical scalpel.
This story is from the November 10, 2017 edition of FRONTLINE.
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This story is from the November 10, 2017 edition of FRONTLINE.
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