Orissa HC: Wife Not Reporting Missing Husband or Living with Another Man Doesn’t Prove Criminal Conspiracy
The Orissa High Court has ruled that a wife cannot be held guilty of criminal conspiracy under Section 120-B of the IPC just because she did not report her husband missing and was living with another man. The Court overturned her conviction, stating that her actions alone do not prove a conspiracy to kill her husband.
The case began in 2007 when a man went missing after leaving for college. Later that day, two men, Syama Choudhury and Surya Kanta Behera (Katiki), met the wife of the missing man. In the afternoon, Katiki convinced the husband to go with him on a motorcycle, supposedly to meet a girl. The husband never returned.
That night, Katiki returned home alone and told the man’s daughter that her father went to a temple. Days later, the police found an unidentified dead body. During investigation, they traced it back to the missing man. A post-mortem report confirmed the man died from homicidal injuries caused by blunt force and burns.
Based on this, the trial court convicted Syama Choudhury and Katiki of murder and found the wife guilty of criminal conspiracy, simply because she didn’t search for her husband and was living with Syama.
However, during appeal, the High Court examined the testimonies of the couple’s children, who mentioned frequent fights between their parents and the mother’s close relationship with Syama. Still, the Court found no concrete evidence proving that the wife had planned her husband’s murder.
The Court said that just living with another man and failing to lodge a missing complaint do not prove conspiracy unless there is solid evidence of an agreement between two people to commit a crime, which was missing in this case.
The Court also said that Syama’s presence at the house and helping police recover the murder weapon was not enough to prove his guilt. As a result, the Court acquitted both the wife and Syama, while upholding Katiki’s conviction for murder due to strong evidence of him being last seen with the deceased.
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