On Saturday, the Madras High Court said that the FIR registered into the Anna University sexual assault case blames the victim, and slammed the police for ‘wrong wordings’ in the FIR. A vacation bench of Justice SM Subramaniam and Justice V Lakshminarayan made the comments during a special hearing into a petition seeking CBI investigation into the case.
The court ordered an all-women SIT probe into the case, slammed police for irregularities in the probe, ordered the state government to pay compensation to the victim, and also asked the state to consider a probe against Police Commissioner for a press conference on the case. Further the court asked the university to allow the girl to complete the study without any fees.
After reading the FIR, Justice Lakshminarayan said that “This is pure victim blaming”, asking Attorney General PS Ramam whether he had read it. Justice Subramaniam said that the bench is sure that the FIR will not stand trial because it is wrongly worded, and blames the victim girl for the sexual assault on her.
The judge said, “We’re sure that this will not stand before any trial court. It’s blaming her for the incident. As if her dressing etc invited the incident.” Justice Subramaniam said that the police personnel should have assisted the victim in drafting the FIR properly so that it could stand the test of trial. He asked how an FIR can be drafted like this. The court also slammed the police following it was told that the FIR without masking the details of the victim was uploaded on website and it was downloaded by some people before it was taken down.
AG PS Raman said that the FIR with unmasked details was downloaded by 14 people before it could be blocked. He said that the error took place due to transition from IPC to BNS. However, the court didn’t accept this explanation, saying that BNS came into effect in 1st July and this is December end. The bench also wanted to know how many FIRs with sensitive information were leaked due to this error in the last five months.
The AG added that media and people who accessed the FIR should show responsibility and not disclose sensitive information in public. The bench responded by saying that the state as the power to prosecute such people.
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