New Delhi, February 17 Ruling out strangulation and rape, the Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the two-year jail term of a man who was challenging his conviction for abetting the suicide of Telugu actress Pratyusha in 2002, and directed him to surrender within four weeks.
Pratyusha died in Hyderabad on February 24, 2002.
According to the remand report, the gist of the case against Gudipalli Siddhartha Reddy is that he and Pratyusha were in love for six years.
While the relationship was acceptable to Pratyusha's mother, Reddy's mother did not agree to the alliance, which led both of them to decide to commit suicide.
On February 23, 2002, both of them went in a car, purchased a pesticide bottle, mixed it in coke, and consumed it. However, they decided that they should not die.
They drove to Care Hospital in Hyderabad. Despite medical care, Pratyusha died while Reddy survived.
A bench comprising justices Rajesh Bindal and Manmohan also dismissed the plea filed by P Sarojini Devi, Pratyusha's mother, who alleged foul play in the death.
"This court holds that the accused's conduct in entering into and acting upon the suicide pact falls squarely within all the three situations envisaged in Section 107 (Abetment) of the IPC. His participation directly facilitated the deceased's suicide," the bench said.
Notably, it is not his defence that the deceased was the dominant personality who pressured him into the pact. His culpability therefore stands established," the bench said.
The top court said the allegation of homicidal death by manual strangulation is wholly unsustainable.
"A wealth of ocular and medical evidence points to poisoning. The materials on record, when examined holistically, leave no room for doubt that the deceased died due to consumption of organophosphate poison, specifically Nuvacron..."
"Consequently, the convergence of multiple independent expert opinions lends overwhelming credibility to the conclusion that the deceased died of poisoning," the bench said.
The top court also slammed Dr. Muni Swamy, who conducted the post-mortem of the actress, and said that even though there was a doctor on duty on February 25, 2002, he came to the mortuary on his own and did the autopsy.
The bench said it was surprising as Dr. Swamy was neither on duty at the mortuary nor on call duty as a professor.
"The premature and erroneous opinion of Dr. Muni Swamy unleashed a wave of public controversy. Media reports amplified his conclusions, leading to widespread suspicion of investigators and calls for immediate action against alleged perpetrators."
"This demonstrates how a single erroneous report, when prematurely publicized, can distort public perception and derail the course of justice," the bench said.
In 2011, the Andhra Pradesh High Court reduced the jail sentence of Reddy, who was convicted for her death, to two years from the five years earlier awarded.
The trial court had on February 23, 2004, sentenced Reddy to five years' imprisonment and slapped a fine of Rs 5,000 on charges of abetment of suicide. It had also awarded him one more year of imprisonment and a fine of Rs 1,000 for attempting suicide.
