The Supreme Court has in a judgment said a suspect’s decision to abscond to avoid arrest does not necessarily imply guilty conscience.
The tendency of a person to escape the clutches of the police on hearing that an FIR has been filed against him is not so out of the ordinary, a three-judge Bench led by Justice B.R. Gavai reasoned.
“The abscondence by a person against whom an FIR has been lodged and who is under expectation of being apprehended is not very unnatural. Mere absconding by the appellant after alleged commission of crime and remaining untraceable for such a long time itself cannot establish his guilt or his guilty conscience,” Justice Dipankar Datta, one of the three judges on the Bench, wrote in the verdict.
