Calcutta HC acquits lawyer in 41-year-old rape-murder case

KOLKATA: Forty-one years after a lawyer was implicated by police for the rape-murder of his niece, and given life term by a trial court 37 years after the crime, Calcutta High Court on Wednesday freed Banamali Chowdhury citing faults in police probe.
The killed woman, daughter of a Bankura cinema hall owner, was found brutalised and murdered by her sister at their Bankura home on Feb 22, 1983.She had just enrolled for post-graduate studies and was to get married soon.
Police claimed Chowdhury was in a relationship with his niece and killed her before her wedding to a Kolkata-based engineer. The case went to trial in 1986 and it took a Bankura sessions court 37 years to convict Chowdhury of rape-murder. It sentenced him to life imprisonment on April 21, 2023. Police maintained Chowdhury, being a lawyer, was stalling the probe. Chowdhury moved HC against the conviction order.
While the trial court upheld the police findings, the HC observed there was over-reliance on the fact that a sniffer dog had barked at Chowdhury at the crime scene, that the blood, hair and semen samples collected from the crime spot were sent for forensic tests after nearly two months, and two critical witnesses — the woman’s sister and the house help — had refused to corroborate the police claims. It gave Chowdhury the “benefit of doubt”.
HC: Inexplicable delay in sending samples for FSL test
A division bench of justices Joymalya Bagchi and Gaurang Kanth noted that police are empowered to use force to compel a suspect to give samples in a heinous crime, but in this case, after Chowdhury refused, they did nothing beyond shooting off three letters asking him to cooperate. The police had claimed the accused’s refusal was akin to presumption of guilt.
Also, blood, semen and hair samples collected from the crime scene on Feb 23, were sent for forensic tests on April 11 and April 23. Noting that there was “inexplicable delay in sending the samples for FSL examination”, the court said the “delay was due to investigational lethargy”. It said lack of proper preservation of the biological samples in the malkhana and the inordinate delay “would undoubtedly cast ashadow on the reliability of the DNA report even if the appellant had cooperated”.
Justice Bagchi, who authored the judgment, also questioned why the cops suddenly changed track to focus solely on Chowdhury. The murdered woman’s parents had suspected a local petrol pump owner who had an affair with their daughter. This suspect had claimed he was watching a movie with his friends when the incident took place. He was initially detained but let off because when a sniffer dog was taken to the crime scene, it went up to Chowdhury and started barking. The court observed “the investigating officer was not the dog handler and even so, dog-tracking may be used for investigation but cannot be taken as evidence to prove guilt”.
Senior lawyer Sudipta Moitra, who argued for Chowdhury said, “After his conviction in 2023, Chowdhury was in prison for some time before obtaining bail from the Supreme Court.”