Supreme Court deplores how selective leaks in the public realm compromises investigation, and pulls the rug below the presumption of innocence of the accused. New Delhi: In a significant judgment on Thursday, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court – comprising Justices D.Y. Chandrachud, Indu Malhotra and Indira Banerjee – set aside the order of the single judge of the Allahabad high court granting anticipatory bail to the accused in a dowry death case, and directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to further investigate the case. The deceased was an anaesthetist and was working in the family-run nursing home of the respondent-accused. She died within five years and eight months of her marriage. The husband of the deceased – who is also a doctor – was taken into custody on August 7. His father, mother, brother and sister sought anticipatory bail, which was first declined by the sessions judge, Agra. The husband submitted that the suicide note allegedly left behind by his deceased wife did not allege harassment for dowry. On September 9, non-bailable warrants were issued against the four accused. On September 29, the high court granted them anticipatory bail, after protecting the accused from arrest from September 22. Curiously, the police did not take any effort to apprehend them before September 22. In the judgment granting anticipatory bail to the four accused, the single judge of the high court observed that the FIR prima facie appeared to be engineered to implicate them. “From the perusal of the material on record, particularly the income-tax returns, it cannot be said that the applicants (accused) are not of sufficient means. The absence of any external injury on the body of the deceased, clearly denotes the bonafide (sic) of applicants,” the judge wrote. The father of the deceased appealed against the grant of anticipatory bail before the Supreme Court, alleging that the police did not investigate the case, despite information that his daughter had been killed, which indicated the commission of a cognisable offence. A charge-sheet dated October 24 was submitted to the competent court on November 5 hastily, without proper investigation of the crime, alleged the petitioner before the Supreme Court. The respondents-accused alleged that the post mortem report indicated that the death occurred as a result of suicide by hanging, and there were no bodily injuries which displaced the allegation that the in-laws were involved in the crime. The suicide note, according to the accused, indicated that she was in a depressed mental state due to her miscarriages. She had adopted a girl child in June 2018. The suicide note, recovered by the police on August 3 – the day of her alleged attempt to die by suicide – was extensively published in the local newspapers. The FIR did not indicate that the note was fabricated. Before the Supreme Court, the state police supported the father of the deceased who assailed the correctness of the order granting anticipatory bail to the accused. Yet the police admitted that no investigation has been carried out on the allegation that the deceased was murdered. The police submitted that the report from the Forensic Science Laboratory on the authenticity of the suicide note was awaited, as initially the FSL had returned the note in the absence of adequate material for comparing the hand writing. The investigating officer, the police claimed, has now resubmitted the same with necessary supporting material to the FSL.