Kerala High Court on Monday halted till Friday the trial in the alleged sexual assault of an actress in her car, in which a top male actor is among the accused, after the survivor and the prosecution sought transfer of the case from the trial court.
Both the actress and the prosecution have expressed lack of confidence in the trial judge, saying she allowed the defence lawyers to harass the victim with uncomfortable questions during the closed-door hearings.
On October 30, the trial court had rejected the prosecution’s petition seeking a halt to the proceedings until it had heard from the high court, and ordered resumption of the trial on Tuesday. Now the single-judge high court bench of Justice V.G. Arun has deferred the trial till Friday.
While the actress had petitioned the high court on October 28 citing the trial court’s “biased and hostile” attitude, saying it had failed to record certain key points too, the prosecution backed her contention on October 30.
It’s not clear whether the defence plans to oppose a transfer of the case or to seek to be heard in the high court.
A gang of men had allegedly hijacked the actress’s car while she was travelling alone from Thrissur to Kochi on February 18, 2017. They are accused of assaulting her sexually inside the moving vehicle while filming the entire sequence, apparently as part of a blackmail plot.
The case has more than 10 accused, with actor Dileep charged with plotting the assault.
Senior lawyer S. Sreekumar, who appeared for the actress in the high court, said that 17 lawyers, eight of them representing Dileep, were in the trial court while she was cross-examined for nine days.
He said the trial court had done nothing to protect the survivor although the prosecution had objected to the way in which the defence lawyers were harassing her.
It was the high court that had assigned the trial to additional sessions judge Honey M. Varghese after the actress had sought a woman judge.
The trial court has also been accused of refusing to record — as “hearsay”— the survivor’s statement that another actress had sometime before the alleged assault told her that Dileep had spoken about setting the survivor ablaze.
Public prosecutor Suman Chakravarthy told the high court that the trial judge had agreed to record some of the prosecution’s statements only after he had threatened to walk out of the courtroom.
The prosecution told the high court that it had not been provided with a copy of the forensic lab report on the visuals collected from the mobile phones of the accused.
The investigations had led to the arrest of Dileep, who was granted conditional bail after spending 88 days in jail.
In November last year, the Supreme Court had rejected Dileep’s plea for a copy of the mobile phone visuals and ordered that efforts be made to complete the trial in six months.
Only 80 of the 359 prosecution witnesses have so far been examined, though. Besides, some of the key witnesses have turned hostile, deepening the challenge before the prosecution.