Was The Goa Court Biased In Acquitting Tarun Tejpal

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• TarunTejpal was accused of forcing himself on a junior colleague against her will inside an elevator
• The judge points out that the accuser's "abnormal behaviour" was very relevant under the law of evidence.
• The accused had submitted an apology and an email, both of which the complainant thought were insufficient. The accused had not admitted to sexual assault, according to the judge. However, the wordings suggested certain immoral behaviour.
• On May 21, he was acquitted of all the charges by a fast track court in Mapusa, Goa.
• The judge was held accountable for the indecent details about the woman's sex life that surfaced throughout the trial.

OVERVIEW

• TarunTejpal, co-founder of Tehelka Magazine was accused of forcing himself on a junior colleague against her will inside an elevator of the Grand Hyatt, Bambolim, Goa.

• On May 21, he was acquitted of all the charges by a fast track court in Mapusa, Goa.

• Timeline:

23rd November 2013- An FIR was filed against Tarun Tejpal for assaulting her junior colleague

30th November 2013 -Anticipatory bail was rejected by the court and he was place under arrest

July 2014:Tejpal was granted bail

28th September 2017:Charges were framed by session court against TarunTejpal

19th August 2019: Supreme Court rejects his plea to quash the FIR filed against him

21st May 2021: He was acquitted of all the charges by a fast track court in Mapusa, Goa.

OBSERVATIONS MADE BY THE JUDGE

• According to the judge, even if the victim has a habit of sexual intercourse, the conclusion that the accuser is a woman of "loose moral character" is not acceptable, citing case law and the Indian Evidence Act. The judge did, however, rule that the prosecution always bears the burden of proving each element of the crime it wants to establish, and that the burden of proof never shifts. The prosecution must stand on its own two feet and cannot rely on the defence's case being weak.
• She cited a Supreme Court decision which stated that no matter how strong the court's moral beliefs and convictions are unless the accused's guilt is shown beyond a reasonable doubt based on legal evidence and material on record, he cannot be convicted of an offence. The court also stated that the idea of believing the accuser cannot be applied automatically. The accused must be shielded from the potential of being falsely implicated.
• The accuser’s narration provided the judge to doubt her testimony. Nikhil Agarwal was the first person she met after the 7 November event. She had included this fact in her statement explaining her recollection of the incidents, but she had kept it hidden from the police and the magistrate before whom she gave a statement. She claimed Agarwal was not a friend when faced with the omission during cross-examination.
• The judge did observe, however, that she had exchanged roughly 4,000 WhatsApp messages with him in the previous 15 months, which included her "innermost truths and secrets." In his testimony, Agarwal stated that she was smiling when she approached him. He recalls her asking him to guess with whom she had "flirted." This happened shortly after she was supposedly assaulted. She had responded it was “TarunTejpal.
• Before the matter got to court, Agarwal offered to provide a statement to the police, but for some reason, he was not questioned at that time. He was called as a witness for the defence. The footage from the second-floor camera corroborated the witness' She noticed that it "does not corroborate the claim that she was in shock or trauma and blinking back tears."
• The judge also discovered that the lift doors on the bottom floor opened twice during the relevant two minutes, contradicting the woman's statement that the lift doors did not open.
• The woman, according to the accused, had invited him to join her to the actor's suite on November 7th. The bottom level camera footage at that time showed him leaving the lift area with his arms around her and walking out into the open. He had her by the forearm as they re-enter less than six minutes later, right in front of the ground floor camera.
• Before re-entering the lift, the accused claims they were just engaged in "drunken conversation." He denied that anything else happened in the elevator. He claimed that they accidentally exited on the first floor so they walked to the end of a corridor, then returned to the lift and exited on the second floor.
• The woman adjusting her clothes and the accused wiping his lips captured on the camera footage could have been a harmless gesture, but in light of the charge, it indicated that something other than banter had occurred in the lift. The judge, on the other hand, did not think it was essential enough to focus on.
• After the second alleged sexual assault on November 8, the complainant sent three texts to the accused, without informing him that she was in the Capiz Bar with the Hollywood star. The judge points out that the accuser's "abnormal behaviour" was very relevant under the law of evidence.
• The victim had told her mother about the two instances on November 9th. Her mother had neither insisted that she return to her Mumbai apartment nor had she chosen to visit Goa. The judge expressed concern about the mother's actions.
• The judge was held accountable for the indecent details about the woman's sex life that surfaced throughout the trial. She stated that she had only admitted those that demonstrated facts or that the woman was lying or manipulating the court.
• The woman refused to have a medical checkup, which could have aided her case. She cited fear of the police as the reason for not filing a report following the alleged assaults.

Failure of Investigation

According to the court, the investigation had failed in the following ways.

• According to the defence, despite seeing the camera footage of the lift areas on the ground, first, and second floors three times in November 2013, she and other police officials failed to retain and preserve the first-floor footage, which would have shown the lift opening there during the 7 November incident and two of them walking out and back
• Another significant mistake of the investigation was failing to learn about the mechanism for stopping the lifts. The victim claimed the lift was in motion when she was allegedly abused on November 7th, but the hotel security team estimated that the lifts would take not more than 20 seconds to move from the ground to the second floor and vice versa.

Apology by the accused

• The accused had submitted an apology and an email, both of which the complainant thought were insufficient. The accused had not admitted to sexual assault, according to the judge. However, the wordings suggested certain immoral behaviour.
• In court, he denied the claims, which goes against the spirit of the apology and the email. The accused stated that he did not write the apology and that Shoma Chaudhury and his sister Neena forced it onto him.

CONCLUSION

The judge has been slammed by critics for stating that the woman's behaviour following the alleged sexual assault was not "normative." The judge made no mention of the woman's failure to meet an "ideal" standard of behaviour. By normative, she may have meant the ‘normal' depressed demeanour that may be anticipated of people in similar situations. The judge said that the woman's claim that she fought hard in the elevator to stop the accused showed "extreme implausibility" and that "it was not possible to believe that, a woman who is aware of the laws, intelligent, yoga trainer, would not push or ward off the accused."

The fact that the victim's friends and colleagues are the most natural people to confide in, the State claims the court made an error in not using consistent statements of the victim's friends and colleagues as corroborative evidence, even though the court readily accepted the entire testimony of defence witnesses as gospel truth.

Despite the expectations of Goa's ruling party and the community of women's rights activists, the judge was courageous in ruling in favour of the accused. However, by enabling the woman's name to be revealed in various indirect ways, such as her email address and the title of the Word document, she has unnecessarily made herself the subject of insults. The Goa High Court has ordered that any references to the identify be erased from the judgement. The court admitted the appeal. The higher court would have to assess the evidence in the case and decide if Judge Joshi overstepped her legal bounds or provided an evidence-based decision in this case.