Srinagar: Concluding a legal battle that lasted over ten years, the Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed a criminal appeal filed by the former state of Jammu and Kashmir, thereby upholding the acquittal of Gulzar Ahmad Bhat alias Peer and three others in a rape case stemming from a 2013 FIR registered at Khansahib Police Station in Budgam.
The ruling was delivered by a bench comprising Justices BV Nagarathna and Satish Chandra Sharma.
Nagamuthu strongly emphasised the high bar for appellate interference in acquittal cases, pointing out that the accused enjoy a “double presumption of innocence”, first as individuals on trial and second as persons acquitted by a court of law.
The case involved the State contesting earlier judgments by both the Sessions Court and the Jammu and Kashmir High Court, which had acquitted the accused of charges under Sections 376 (rape) and 109 (abetment) of the now-repealed Ranbir Penal Code, which previously governed the region’s criminal laws before Article 370 was revoked.
The Sessions Court in Budgam had, in a verdict dated February 12, 2015 (Sessions Case No. 142/S), found respondents 1, 3, 5, and 6 not guilty due to a lack of sufficient evidence. The State’s subsequent appeal to the High Court was rejected by a Division Bench on February 23, 2017, which upheld the lower court’s reasoning. Unhappy with the outcome, the State took the case to the Supreme Court as Criminal Appeal No. 1682 of 2017.
The matter was heard in Court No. 7, where the State was represented by advocates Parth Awasthi and Pradeep Baisoya, instructed by Advocate-on-Record Pashupathi Nath Razdan. The State argued that Prosecution Witnesses 1 to 5 had given consistent statements pointing to the accused’s guilt and contended that both lower courts had overlooked this evidence, resulting in a miscarriage of justice.
