New Delhi: Amidst public outcry over the acquittal of all the nine accused in the Jessica Lall murder case, legal experts are divided over whether there should be a retrial on the lines of the one ordered by the Supreme Court in the Best Bakery case.
"Why can't there be a retrial?" asks noted criminal lawyer K K Sud.
"The whole investigation appears to have been bungled. What I have gathered from newspaper reports is that the case speaks of lapses. The prosecution should have recovered the weapon. It appears that the role of investigating officials was callous," Sud adds.
Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan agrees with Sud but says mere retrial is not enough.
"There should be a reinvestigation into what really happened, especially why witnesses retracted statements," Bhushan said.
However, senior lawyer and former law minister Ram Jethmalani refused to comment on the issue of retrial as he once appeared for prime accused Manu Sharma in this case.
Unlike the Best Bakery case, which was transferred from Gujarat on the orders of the Supreme Court, experts believe that the Jessica case need not be transferred outside Delhi.
"If the case were to be sent outside Delhi, justice would only be delayed that much more. Because judicial proceedings in the Capital are relatively more efficient than elsewhere," says Ashok Arora, former secretary of Supreme Court Bar Association.
However, lead defence counsel in the Jessica trial, Pt R K Naseem has said that there is a basic difference between the two trials.
"In the Best Bakery case, the police even refused to record statement of the victims, the witnesses were not even properly examined. In Jessica's case, the trial was according to the procedure," Naseem said.
However, legal experts are also divided on whether to amend the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) to check the growing trend of witnesses turning hostile.
"There is no fault in the CrPC. We have abandoned the criminal proceedings prior to 1973. Earlier, initial statements were to be recorded by the magistrate, and once done, the witness had to think a hundred times before changing it," senior counsel K T S Tulsi said.
"Now, an Investigating Officer (IO) in the rank of a Sub-Inspector records the witness' statement, which is not even signed by the witness himself. So, an IO can write whatever he wants, and file a chargesheet," Tulsi added.
Opposing amendment in the present CrPC, Jethmalani said, "It will be very dangerous to make a witness a substantive evidence".
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