Supreme Court to Katju: Show us how we erred on murder verdict

In an unprecedented move, the Supreme Court on Monday took suo motu cognisance of a blog by former apex court judge Markandey Katju over the Soumya murder case, and asked him to appear in court for a debate on the fairness of the judgement.

A bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi, P.C. Pant and U.U. Lalit took suo motu cognisance of the blog by Justice Katju, which called the setting aside of murder charges on the accused Go-vindachamy a “grave er-ror” not expected of “jud-ges who had been in the legal world for decades”.

The bench hearing the review petitions filed by Soumya’s mother Sumathi and the Kerala government said it had great respect for Justice Katju, which is why it wanted him to appear personally on November 11 and debate in court his obs-ervation that the judgement was fundamentally flawed.

The bench said it is not “appropriate” to pass any decision on the review petitions at this stage without hearing the issues raised by Justice Katju in his blog.

On September 17, Justice Katju wrote on his blog: “From the evidence on record it appears that Sou-mya had two sets of injuries... The head is a vital part of the body, and is not like a leg. So catching the hair of a woman and rep-eatedly hitting her head against a wall is sufficient in the ordinary course to cause death.”

Justice Katju went on to say that the SC erred by acquitting the accused. “The statements of prosecution witnesses were hearsay evidence as they themselves did not see Saumya jumping off the train. And hearsay evidence is inadmissible in evidence vide section 60 of the Indian Evidence Act, except in certain limited circumstances e.g. a dying declaration or opinion of an expert,” he wrote.