Justice served after 29 years

By HT, Tuesday, August 14, 2007, 01:06 AM

Twenty-nine years after a private bus ran over a man in East Delhi, the Delhi High Court on Monday sentenced its driver to an year's rigorous imprisonment for rash and negligent driving causing death.

The case is unique in the sense that the accused Desh Raj in a way "helped" the prosecution to secure his conviction after a lower court acquitted him in March 1985 for "want of evidence". The state moved the High Court against the acquittal, but the police, during the long drawn trial had lost all its records of the case. Raj, according to Justice J. M. Malik "was kind enough to provide the copy of the case documents he had. Ironically, he was punished on the basis of that. It was the manner in which he left the victim to die and fled the accident scene that earned him the punishment. Otherwise the court was inclined to take a lenient view".

"Although the case is pending since 1979 and as such, the accused deserves a lenient view, yet on the other hand, the court cannot wink at the fact that the accused ran away from the spot without caring for the deceased," Justice Malik said. The trial court had acquitted Raj after three witnesses had given the wrong registration number.

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