Kanoon - Weaknesses in Defence Reasoning

Weaknesses in Defence Reasoning

The defence represented by Kailash Khanna too has several fatal weaknesses, although these were never brought to the notice of the court by the prosecution side. Here are some:

• Kaalia is shown being caught by Subinspector Das at 11.55 pm. The time is noted by Das by his own wrist watch. In India, generally a murder case is committed to trial months or even years after the murder. During trial, Kailash proves that Das's watch is slower by 13 minutes (an unlucky number). He asks Das the time. Das consults the very same wrist watch he was wearing at the time of murder and tells the court that the time is 3.55 pm. At that very same time, the court's watch is showing 4.08 pm, proving that Das's watch was 13 minutes slower. By this fact, Kailash proves that Kaalia was caught at 12.08 am (on July 1) rather than on 11.55 pm on 30 June thus conveniently bringing him out of suspicion. It is incomprehensible that the subinspector kept his watch slower by the same amount over the months it took the case to come to trial.

• Kailash reasons that the Police surgeon mentioned in his postmortem report that the murder took place between 11.30 and 12.00. This quite possibly includes 12.00 midnight also. And if this time is taken as the true time of murder, Kaalia's arrest at 12.08 can be easily explained. But Kailash takes the ploy of taking an arithmetic mean of the two extremes of time mentioned in the report and assumes (without objection from the prosecution), that the murder took place at 11.45 pm (on 30 June). He then goes on to reason that Kaalia should have been with the corpse for a full 23 minutes (he was caught at 00.08 am on 1 July) with his hands smeared in blood. This is obviously unlikely. And thus Kaalia cannot be the murderer. Strangely this defective reasoning is never challenged by the prosecution.

• The prosecution story is that Kaalia went through the pipe to Dhaniram's house (through an open window) and tried to steal something. Dhaniram who was sleeping at that time woke up, tried to apprehend Kaalia. During the struggle milk got spilt (in fact it was already spilt when Kaalia came in). Kaalia stabbed Dhaniram and rushed back to the window to get down, and in the process his foot prints were imprinted on the spilt milk. Kailash could have easily punched holes in this story, by pointing out that the footprints were directed inwards (towards the center of the room where Dhaniram's corpse was lying). According to the prosecution story, the footprints should have been directed outwards (towards the window, from where he eventually came out). This interesting fact was never brought to the court's notice. Furthermore, when Kaalia came in, he was tiptoeing (to avoid anyone listening to his footsteps). This led to two successive footprints being very near. When a person is running (as the case should have been when Kaalia ran out of the room after supposedly murdering Dhaniram), the two successive footprints should be much farther. This fact was also never brought to the notice of the court.