Nineteen years after a banker was found dead and police claimed his wife conspired with her alleged lover to kill him, the Supreme Court has acquitted the woman, ruling that suspicion, no matter how serious, cannot replace legal evidence.
A bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and Prasanna P Varali upheld Monica Kiran Suryawanshi’s acquittal and refused 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 had failed to establish a continuous 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 has not been established exclusively,” the bench said on Monday, while dismissing appeals filed by the state of Maharashtra against the 2010 acquittal of the Bombay High Court.
The case had all the elements of a crime thriller. According to the prosecution, Monica, who married Kiran for love in 2001, was involved in an extramarital affair with one of her neighbours. Investigators alleged that the two, along with another man, hatched a plot to eliminate Kiran. They claimed that Monica drugged her husband with tablets and injections before hitting his head with a grinding stone inside their home. The body was then wrapped in plastic and a sheet before being transported on a motorbike for disposal.
The elimination plan falls apart dramatically when a policeman on patrol spots two men riding a motorcycle with a suspicious package between them. A human foot was seen protruding from the bundle, which led to the discovery of Kiran’s body. The two men were arrested immediately.
The Sessions Court convicted Monica and two other accused in 2008 and sentenced them to life imprisonment. But the Bombay High Court overturned the conviction two years later, holding that the circumstantial evidence presented by the prosecution was too weak to support a murder conviction.
The Supreme Court has now confirmed this view after conducting a detailed examination of each episode in the prosecution’s story.
The court found that one of the biggest blows to the prosecution was its inability to prove the alleged relationship that was supposed to have been the motive behind the murder. The prosecution relied on witnesses who claimed that Prakash introduced Monica as his mistress and sent her gifts. But the bench found this insufficient.
The ruling noted that the evidence at its highest level pointed to mere “one-sided infatuation” on the part of the other defendants. There was “no convincing evidence” to show that Monica reciprocated those feelings or harbored any animosity toward her husband. The court added that phone records alone cannot prove the existence of an illicit relationship leading to murder.
The court was also not convinced by the “last seen” theory put forward by the prosecution. A colleague testified that he dropped Kieran home between 8.30pm and 9pm on the night of the incident and watched him enter the house. The Supreme Court found the witness’s behavior abnormal and questioned why he waited outside for Kiran to enter despite having his own motorcycle. More importantly, the prosecution never determined the exact time of death, making the “last seen” evidence too fragile to support a conviction.
Ironically, the prosecution’s own digital evidence also undermines its theory. The police claimed that Monica called Prakash on phone after confirming that her husband had fallen asleep. But call detail logs tell a different story. The court noted that there was no outgoing call from Monica’s phone to Prakash’s phone that night. Instead, the records showed incoming calls from Prakash’s phone to Monica’s number, supporting the defense’s claim that Kiran may have forgotten his phone at home and was calling from Prakash’s phone. The court held that the FIR’s allegation that Monica had summoned Prakash was therefore “not supported by the digital trail”.
The court also criticized the investigation. Investigators relied heavily on the alleged recovery of the grinding stone, syringe and blood-stained clothing in Monica’s case. But the court found that these refunds were riddled with procedural flaws. The recovered items were not sealed, making it impossible to rule out tampering prior to forensic examination. The alleged murder weapon was also recovered from an open public area accessible to anyone, significantly weakening its evidence value.
Another glaring discrepancy was that despite the prosecution’s claim that Kiran was beaten to death in bed, investigators did not find any blood on the mattress, bed sheet or pillow, the court said.
Emphasizing the well-established principles governing cases based solely on circumstantial evidence, the Supreme Court relied on the landmark decision in Sharad Birdhichand Sarda v. State of Maharashtra, which held that every circumstance must form a complete and unbroken chain pointing only to the guilt of the accused. It considered that this criterion was clearly not met in the present case.
The court did not provide complete relief to all concerned. It upheld the conviction of Prakash and another accused for causing disappearance of evidence under Section 201 of the Indian Penal Code.
The council noted that the two men were caught red-handed transporting Kiran’s body on a motorbike in the early hours of February 15, 2007, leaving little room for doubt that they had tried to hide evidence of the crime. Since they had served a one-year prison sentence for that crime, the court refused to interfere in the Supreme Court’s order to release them.
