PANAJI
The Bombay High Court at Goa on Thursday directed the trial court to ‘redact’ those portions of her judgement that could reveal the identity of the victim girl before uploading the order on the website.
The judgement which was made available to the parties on Tuesday but is yet to be made publicly available, at several portions reveals information that could lead to those reading the judgement recognizing her. Among the details included in the judgement are her husband’s and mother’s names, her email address among other details.
When the appeal came up for hearing before the vacation bench of justice S C Gupte, Solicitor General of India Tushar Mehta called for the portions to be redacted.
“It appears from the impugned judgment of the Sessions Judge, available to this Court, but which, the Court is informed, is not yet uploaded on the trial Court website, that it contains a reference to the victim's husband and also her email ID, a reference to the Gmail account of the victim and a reference to the name of the mother of the prosecutrix. In the interest of protecting the identity of the victim of an offence, such as the one with which we are concerned in the present case, it is appropriate to have the above references to be found in the impugned judgment redacted. The trial Court is accordingly directed to redact the above references, as also other similar references, wherever found in the order, whilst uploading the impugned judgment,” the single judge bench of Justice S C Gupte, said.
The government, which admitted that it had filed an appeal even before it had received a copy of the order, also sought time to amend its petition to “place the order on record and amend the grounds of appeal.”
“We had not received this judgement until May 25, so we have also requested the Court to permit us to add some more grounds to the appeal which we had filed. That has also been granted by the HC,” Government Advocate Pravin Faldessai said.
The matter has been posted to June 2.
Tejpal was acquitted by additional sessions judge Kshama Joshi who in a much awaited verdict said that the prosecution failed to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt and proceeded to give the benefit of doubt to the accused Tarun Tejpal.
