Police inspector who was sentenced to 4 years imprisonment, acquitted by HC

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru:

A police inspector who was sentenced to four years imprisonment by a trial court after being convicted for amassing over Rs.10 lakh in assets above his known sources of income has been acquitted by the High Court. The High Court found that the investigation against him was without jurisdiction. He was initially probed for a bribery charge and based on a raid on his house and collection of some documents; he was tried for the disproportionate case separately.

Citing a Supreme Court judgement the HC said that “Where criminal proceedings are initiated based on illicit material collected on search and arrest which are per se illegal, vitiate not only a conviction and sentence based on such material, but also the trial itself.”

Justice Mohammad Nawaz in his recent judgement, therefore set aside the conviction and sentence passed by the trial court against the accused Y Gangi Reddy, a police inspector serving at the Karnataka Coastal Security police station, Udupi. The issue began in 2009 when one Srinivas Prasad alleged that Gangi Reddy had demanded a bribe of Rs 30,000.

The Lokayukta police had tried to trap Reddy and sent Prasad with a voice recorder. Reddy allegedly found out about the recorder and destroyed it after snatching it from Prasad. A complaint was filed and a day after the alleged incident, police conducted a search in the home of Reddy and recovered some documents. A ‘C’ Report was filed in the bribery case as no evidence was found.

However, based on the documents recovered in the search, a case under disproportionate assets was registered against Reddy on October 23, 2010. The trial began in 2013. In this case, the Special Court in Dakshina Kannada convicted him on August 27, 2020. He had filed an appeal against it in the HC. The HC noted that the investigating officer in the case who filed the charges sheet has himself admitted “that the police inspector has no power to investigate the said case.

He has stated that the said police inspector was not authorised and there was no permission granted to him to conduct investigation. Further, after registration of crime, there was no raid conducted in the house of the accused and no documents were collected.

The HC also found several inconsistencies in the trial court order. It found that the agricultural income of Reddy was not added to his income while calculating the disproportionate assets. “The trial court was not justified in rejecting the agricultural income of the accused in toto,” the HC said. The judgment and order of the Special court dated August 27, 2020 was set aside by the HC.