SC issues notice to Centre on PILs seeking compensation for victims of wrongful prosecution

Satya Prakash

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 23

The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued notice to the Centre on petitions filed by two Delhi BJP leaders seeking compensation for a rape accused from Uttar Pradesh who walked free after spending 20 years in jail as the Allahabad High Court found him innocent.

A Bench headed by Justice UU Lalit asked the Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of Law and Justice to respond to the petitions filed by Delhi BJP leaders Kapil Mishra and Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay after senior Advocate Vijay Hansaria highlighted the plight of victims of wrongful prosecution.

The petitioners have urged the top court to frame guidelines to ensure strict action to prosecute fake complainants’ payment of adequate compensation to victims of malicious and wrongful prosecution.

At the outset, the Bench said the existing mechanism under criminal law was good enough to deal with the issue. However, later it agreed to examine only the prayer with regard to framing guidelines for grant of compensation to such victims.

Mishra and Upadhyay have raised the case of Vishnu Tiwari of a village in Lalitpur district who was booked for rape and offences under the Schedule Castes and Schedule Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 after a Dalit woman accused him of sexually assaulting her. The trial court had pronounced him guilty and awarded life imprisonment.

However, the Allahabad High Court recently acquitted him, holding that the victim’s testimony was found trustworthy and the medical evidence belied any case against the accused. The high court expressed anguish over Tiwari’s prolonged incarceration and the government’s failure to recommend his case for remission of sentence or to commute it.

They contended that SC/ST Act was being “abused by filing false and malicious complaints and no action is taken against the culprit in the absence of an effective statutory/legal scheme for providing mandatory compensatory relief and to prosecute the fake complainants.”

Noting that false cases often lead to suicides of innocent men, they submitted that the State was responsible for such acts of its employees (Police and Prosecution) and must repair the damage done to citizens by its officers, by adequate monetary and non-monetary compensation.

Lives of the families of those falsely implicated in such cases were destroyed after years of delayed trial, which only got aggravated by reluctance to take penal action against misconduct of investigating officers and vexatious complainants, Mishra contended.