Ramkrishan Upadhyay
Chandigarh, October 15
Jagjit Singh, Special Judge, CBI court, dismissed a plea of the CBI for recalling/re-examining as many as 20 witnesses in the alleged cash at the judge’s door scam.
The CBI had filed an application under Section 311 of CrPC to recall witnesses dropped during the trial and some new witnesses, who, the agency CBI claimed, were required to prove the case and were not included in the original list of witnesses.
The accused opposed the plea saying that they were facing the trial since long and the evidence of the prosecution already stood closed by the public prosecutor and the lacuna left could not be filled by the way of the present application.
Public prosecutor Narender Singh argued that the counsel prosecuting the case for the CBI earlier had dropped six witnesses and not examined them. However, three of them were important witnesses and needed to be examined to tell the relevancy between accused Ravinder Singh and Justice Nirmal Yadav. It was argued that the previous prosecutor had not declared some witnesses hostile and also did not confront them with their statements. A certificate under Section 65-B of the Indian Evidence Act was also not produced.
After hearing the arguments, the CBI court said till the evidence was closed by the public prosecutor, the prosecution had the opportunity to examine its witnesses for almost nine years, during which it examined 69 witnesses. The court said the examination of all witnesses mentioned in the application, if started, would amount to de novo trial, which had already taken over 10 years to conclude, and nothing had stopped the prosecution from examining these witnesses earlier. But now, if the prosecution felt that they had left any lacuna, the benefit, if any, that has arisen to the accused, could not be defeated in such a casual manner.
While quoting a judgment of the apex court, the CBI court said “mere change of counsel cannot be a ground to recall the witnesses”.
The police had registered the case in 2008 on the complaint of Amrik Singh, a peon of Justice Nirmaljit Kaur, after a bag with Rs 15 lakh was erroneously delivered at her house. After initial investigation, the case was handed over to the CBI.
