Click
here if you would like to Contribute or send a feedback.
Click
here to go to the main page of Memoirs of a Judge.
Click here to read more
about Law.
Sri
Thumbe Krishna Rao was one of the leading advocates in Bangalore and he was one
of my well-wisher. In
about the year 1966, I had gone to his house to call on him. He welcomed me warmly.
During the course of conversation, he told me that the functioning of Magistrate
courts needs to be corrected. I asked him why. He
then told me "There was a theft of some silk sarees and cash from my house, about
four or five years back and the thief was apprehended within a few days and thereafter,
the police requested my wife to come to the police station to identify the sarees
that had been seized. Though my wife was not happy to go to the police station,
she went and identified the sarees. Nothing was heard of for some time, till a
summons was received from the Magistrate court calling upon my wife to attend
the court and depose as a witness. With great distress, she attended the court
and also deposed as a witness. The sarees, which had been wrapped in a piece of
paper and which were totally soiled were shown to her and she identified the same
as her sarees that were stolen. Thereafter nothing was heard of for three or four
years. What happens to those sarees in Court?" I
replied that after the trial of the case is over, an application should have been
made to return those sarees.
He then laughed and said, "Who will wear those
sarees now, even if they were returned to my wife?" I
had no words to reply. Later
in about the year 1968 or so, when I was working as a Magistrate at Mercara, there
was theft of several brass and copper tumblers and other articles from Chitra
Hotel. The police were able to apprehend the accused within a day or two and seized
many of the brass and copper utensils. On
coming to know about the recovery of said items, the proprietor of Chitra Hotel
approached me with a request to return the said articles to him. I then told him
that according to law, those stolen articles will have to be kept in safe custody
in the court, till the disposal of the case and that those articles will have
to be identified in court as the stolen properties. The
proprietor of the hotel then asked me "What is the use of recovering those articles,
if I have to buy new set of utensils for running my hotel?" I
then remembered what Thumbe Krishna Rao had told me. After
keeping samples from each set of utensils, I returned the utensils to him, after
taking an undertaking from him to produce those utensils in court for the purpose
of identification, if necessary, during the course of trial. The necessity of
producing the said utensils before the court did not however arise, since the
accused pleaded guilty to the charge framed against him. Sri.
Venkat Rao,
Retired District and Sessions
Judge,
Saraswathipuram, Mysore. Click
here if you would like to Contribute or send a feedback.
Click
here to go to the main page of Memoirs of a Judge.
Click here to read more
about Law.
| 
