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The Allahabad high court on Friday "partly allowed" a plea of Rajesh and Nupur Talwar and directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to bring on record report of their narco tests and asked the trial court to summon some witnesses in the Aarushi-Hemraj murder case.
Justice Sudhir Agrawal observed, “The right of an accused to put his best evidence can/should not be defeated in the name of expeditious trial".
The court passed the order on Talwars' petition, challenging an order of the special CBI court at Ghaziabad which had rejected their request for placing on record call
details of a couple of mobile phones and a landline, reports of narco-analysis, brain-mapping, sound simulation and other forensic tests conducted on them as well as some witnesses in the case.
The court, however, only "party allowed" the couple's plea for summoning a number of witnesses. It ordered that nodal officers of Vodafone and Bharti Airtel be summoned, as per the petitioners' request.
However, on the plea to order summoning of senior Indian Police Service officer Arun Kumar, at present posted as additional director general of police (law and order) of Uttar Pradesh, the court said it did not "find any justification for his summoning" or "any error on part of the court below in rejecting the requests made by applicants.
Similarly, the request for summoning of the registrar of Supreme Court for producing "original record" of a review petition filed by Talwars last year was described by the high court as "patently mischievous" and having "rightly been rejected by court below".
"It is always open to the accused to obtain a certified copy of review petition filed before the apex court and that would be admissible in evidence without requiring any formal proof before the trial court to the extent that such a document was filed before apex court and is part of record thereof.
"For that purpose, there is no justification whatsoever for directing production of original record of review petition," the court remarked.
CBI counsel Anurag Khanna had opposed the petition, calling it an attempt "to delay trial as much as possible" and accused the dentist couple of having "made a mockery of the system by dragging prosecution to various courts, almost at every stage of proceedings".
As a parting note, the court observed, "The trial court has to be extremely cautious, careful and vigilant so that in the process of expeditiousness, element of fairness, due opportunity and justice is not sacrificed.