The investigative authorities gathered material that the bench of Justices Sureshwar Thakur and Lalit Batra said was not credible. It noted that the case eloquently illustrated the need for the courts to conduct a perceptive and impartial evaluation of the evidence that is in the file, as opposed to permitting it to be stultified by a proactive media trial of the accused’s alleged incriminating role in relation to the crime event.
The Bench also clarified that the “strictest principles of evidentiary logic” had to be followed and that media trials were not at all necessary to serve as the “guiding regimen” for impartial assessments of the evidence in the record. The Bench further stated that the intense media attention around the crime incident appears to have caused the investigating officer’s intellectual capacity to stagnate.
On July 10, 2002, a complaint was filed under Sections 120-B, 302, and 34 of the IPC for the murder of dera manager Ranjit Singh and other offenses after he was shot by four attackers in his hometown of Khanpur Kolian village in Kurukshetra.
