No murder, affair proof: SC clears woman of killing husband after 19 years

NIneteen years after a banker was found deadened and law claimed his married woman conspired with her alleged lover to polish off him, the sublime Court has exonerated the woman, ruling that suspicion, however grave, cannot replace legal proof.A bench of justices Sanjay Karol and Prasanna B Varale upheld the acquittal of Monika Kiran Suryawanshi, refusing to revive murder and conspiracy charges against her. She was accused of killing her husband, Kiran Suryawanshi, a bank employee, in February 2007 over an alleged extramarital affair.The court held that the prosecution failed to establish an unbroken chain of circumstances necessary to secure a conviction in a case based entirely on circumstantial evidence. “The chain of circumstances is broken, and the hypothesis of guilt is not exclusively established,” said the bench on Monday, while dismissing appeals filed by Maharashtra against the Bombay High Court’s 2010 acquittal.The case had all the elements of a crime thriller. According to the prosecution, Monika, who had a love marriage with Kiran in 2001, was allegedly involved in an extramarital relationship with a neighbour. Investigators claimed the two, along with another man, hatched a conspiracy to eliminate Kiran. They alleged Monika sedated her husband with tablets and injections before smashing his head with a grinding stone inside their home. The body was then wrapped in plastic and a bedsheet before being transported on a motorcycle for disposal.The disposal plan unravelled dramatically when a police constable on patrol spotted two men riding a motorcycle with a suspicious bundle between them. A human foot was seen protruding from the bundle, leading to the discovery of Kiran’s body. The two men were arrested on the spot.A sessions court convicted Monika and two co-accused in 2008 and sentenced them to life imprisonment. But the Bombay High Court overturned the conviction two years later, holding that the prosecution’s circumstantial evidence was too weak to sustain a murder conviction.The Supreme Court has now affirmed that view after a detailed examination of every link in the prosecution’s narrative.One of the biggest blows to the prosecution, the court held, was its inability to prove the alleged affair that supposedly provided the motive for murder. The prosecution relied on witnesses who claimed that Prakash had introduced Monika as his lover and had sent her gifts. But the bench found this insufficient.“At its highest,” the judgment noted, the evidence merely suggested “a one-sided infatuation” on the part of the co-accused. There was “no cogent evidence” to show that Monika reciprocated those feelings or harboured any hostility towards her husband. Telephone records alone, the court added, could not prove an illicit relationship leading to murder.The court was equally unconvinced by the prosecution’s “last seen” theory. A colleague had testified that he dropped Kiran off at home between 8.30 pm and 9 pm on the night of the incident and watched him enter the house. The Supreme Court found the witness’s conduct unnatural, questioning why he would wait outside until Kiran entered despite having his own scooter. More importantly, the prosecution never established the exact time of death, making the “last seen” evidence too fragile to support a conviction.Ironically, the prosecution’s own digital evidence also undercut its theory. Police alleged Monika had telephoned Prakash after ensuring her husband had fallen asleep. But the call detail records told a different story. The court noted there was no outgoing call from Monika’s phone to Prakash’s phone that night. Instead, the records showed incoming calls from Prakash’s phone to Monika’s number, lending support to the defence claim that Kiran may have forgotten his own phone at home and was calling from Prakash’s handset. The FIR’s allegation that Monika summoned Prakash was therefore “unsupported by the digital trail”, the court held.The bench was also critical of the investigation. Investigators had relied heavily on the alleged recovery of the blood-stained grinding stone, syringe and clothes at Monika’s instance. But the court found that these recoveries were riddled with procedural defects. The recovered articles had not been sealed, making it impossible to rule out tampering before forensic examination. The alleged murder weapon was also recovered from an open public area accessible to anyone, significantly weakening its evidentiary value.Another glaring inconsistency, the court said, was that despite the prosecution’s claim that Kiran was bludgeoned to death in bed, investigators found no blood on the mattress, bedsheet or pillow.Reiterating the settled principles governing cases based solely on circumstantial evidence, the Supreme Court relied on the landmark decision in Sharad Birdhichand Sarda Vs State of Maharashtra, holding that every circumstance must form a complete and unbroken chain pointing only to the guilt of the accused. That standard, it held, was plainly not met in the present case.The court did not give complete relief to everyone involved. It upheld the conviction of Prakash and another co-accused for causing the disappearance of evidence under Section 201 of the Indian Penal Code.The bench noted that the two men were caught red-handed transporting Kiran’s body on a motorcycle in the early hours of February 15, 2007, leaving little room for doubt that they had attempted to conceal evidence of the crime. Since both had served the one-year sentence imposed for that offence, the court declined to interfere with the high court’s order directing their release.