Supreme Court sets aside his conviction, orders fresh trial within a year for violation of fair trial provisions
NEW DELHI — For Dr Abdul Hameed, the wheels of justice have turned full circle after nearly three decades.
Nearly 30 years after a bomb ripped through a Rajasthan Roadways bus and more than 12 years after he was sent to the gallows, the Supreme Court on Tuesday wiped the slate clean — setting aside Hameed’s conviction and death sentence and ordering a de novo trial.
In a de novo trial, the court completely starts over. It does not look at what the lower court decided, and it doesn’t defer to the lower court’s findings.
Holding that the original proceedings stood “fundamentally vitiated”, a Bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sanjay Karol and Sandeep Mehta ruled that Hameed had been denied the very cornerstone of a fair trial — effective legal representation.
Pronouncing the operative part of the judgment, Justice Sandeep Mehta noted with concern that Hameed was left to fend for himself, forced to cross-examine prosecution witnesses without a lawyer, at a time when no counsel was engaged nor provided by the court. The failure, the court said, rendered the entire trial unfair.
The court was quick to clarify that it was not going into the merits of the prosecution’s case at all — its intervention was confined to the collapse of procedural fairness.
Setting aside the 2014 judgment of the trial court, the apex court has now directed the Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court to assign the retrial to a Special Court in Jaipur, with a direction to conclude proceedings, as far as possible, within one year.
The Bench also said that if Hameed moves for bail, the trial court shall consider it on its own merits, uninfluenced by the earlier findings of the trial court or the high court.
One Acquitted, Six Acquittals Upheld
In a mixed set of directions, the Supreme Court acquitted co-accused Pappu alias Salim, who had been serving life imprisonment for allegedly supplying explosives for the blast.
It also dismissed the Rajasthan government’s appeals against the acquittal of six others — Javed Khan, Latif Ahmed, Mohammad Ali Bhatt, Mirja Nissa Hussain, Abdul Ghani and Rais Beg — thereby affirming the Rajasthan High Court’s 2019 judgment that had acquitted them for want of evidence.
At its heart, the judgment revisits the constitutional guarantee of legal aid, the evidentiary value of confessions, and the exacting standard of proof the prosecution must meet in a terror case.
The case goes back to May 1996, when an explosion inside a Rajasthan Roadways bus travelling from Agra to Bikaner near Samleti in Dausa district claimed 14 lives and left 37 injured.
For Dr Hameed, Tuesday’s order means he will now face trial for the third time.
During his original trial, which culminated in his conviction in 2014, he had no lawyer to defend him. Spotting this fatal flaw, the Rajasthan High Court had, in April 2015, remanded the case back to the trial court only on the question of sentence. The trial court, in December 2015, again awarded him the death penalty.