The Madras High Court on Wednesday set aside the conviction and three-year sentence imposed by a trial court in 2019 against the then Youth Welfare and Sports Development Minister P. Balakrishna Reddy in a 1998 rioting case related to protests against illicit arrack in Krishnagiri district.
Justice G. Jayachandran allowed the appeals preferred by the former Minister and 15 other convicts against the verdict passed by a special court for MP/MLA cases in Chennai in January 2019 and held that the trial court had erred in convicting them despite lack of credible evidence to do so.
“On a cumulative assessment of the evidence, this court finds several lacunae in the prosecution case and those lacunae enure to the benefit of the accused persons. The trial court, unfortunately, failed to note that the prosecution was unable to even ascertain the identity of the accused persons who had gathered for the protest and formed an unlawful assembly. It convicted them at random based on the weak and uncorroborative evidence,” the judge wrote.
The then Minister’s conviction by the trial court had created ripples in the political circles in 2019 since he suffered disqualification from continuing in the AIADMK Cabinet on having been sentenced to more than two years. He chose to resign after the trial court verdict.
He, however, did not have to go to jail because the trial court had suspended his sentence until all 16 convicts in the case preferred appeals before the High Court within a stipulated time. While 13 of them filed a joint appeal, the former Minister and two others, C.V. Venkataramanappa and M. Govinda Reddy, filed individual appeals before the High Court.
Though the former Minister made frantic efforts in 2019 to get the conviction stayed in order to rejoin the Cabinet, Justice V. Parthiban (since retired) of the High Court had in 2019 refused to suspend even the sentence. When the sentence itself was not being suspended, there would be no question of staying the conviction, the judge had said.
Then, the judge had taken serious note of government buses and police vehicles having been damaged and set to fire when a protest at Bagalur village near Hosur, to condemn alleged police inaction against illicit arrack sellers, had turned violent.
“The appellant may not have been an MLA in 1998 but what he had done, which was proved in the trial court, was an affront to the rule of law. This court is unable to comprehend as to how a yesteryear law breaker can claim to continue as law framer,” Justice Parthiban had said while denying interim relief.
Subsequently, the Supreme Court stayed the sentence and thereafter, the High Court began final hearing on the criminal appeals filed by all 16 convicts.
