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Rajesh and Nupur Talwar: India; Part 5; An excerpt from Toronto Star journalist Shree Paradkar's powerful, convincing ebook, "Betrayed: My cousin's wrongful conviction for the murder of his daughter Aarushi," published by The Toronto Star. Links to key documents including autopsy reports and crime scene analysis and the court's judgment.
eBOOK EXCERPT: "Betrayed: My cousin's wrongful conviction for the murder of his daughter Aarushi," by Shree Paradkar: The following story is excerpted from
Betrayed: My Cousin’s Wrongful Conviction for the Murder of Her Daughter, Aarushi
.
The full ebook
is available through the Star’s weekly program Star Dispatches at
stardispatches.com . Toronto Star journalist Shree Paradkar is the cousin of Nupur
Talwar. Her extended family believes Aarushi’s parents are innocent and
were wrongly convicted, and that the case points to serious shortcomings
in India’s legal system. Paradkar grew up in Bangalore, India, where
she was a reporter at the Times of India. She is a home page editor of
thestar.com." (The ebook is available through the Star’s weekly program, Star Dispatches,
where you can subscribe for $1/week. Single copies are $2.99 at
stardispatches.com/starstore
and
stardispatches.com/itunes.)
SUB-HEADING: "In a stinging indictment of India’s
law-enforcement and legal systems, Toronto Star journalist Shree
Paradkar chronicles the farcical investigation and trial that led to
what she believes is the wrongful conviction of a murdered girl’s
parents. The case has made headlines around the world."
GIST: "Prosecutors put forward the argument that Rajesh Talwar came across
Aarushi and live-in cook Hemraj Banjade in the girl’s bedroom, where
they were either about to have sex or were in the middle of it. This was
the “grave and sudden provocation” that led Rajesh to kill them with
his golf club and slit their necks with a dental scalpel. (In fact, the
couple did not practice dentistry in their home and had no reason to
keep instruments there.) No semen was ever found on either Aarushi or Hemraj’s clothes. Neither
Hemraj’s blood nor hair nor DNA was found in Aarushi’s room. This was a
sign of a cleanup by the Talwars, prosecutors alleged. The whitish
discharge in Aarushi’s vagina — normal in pubescent girls between
periods — was proof of sex, they said. The doctor who conducted the post-mortem on Hemraj told court that the
dead man’s swollen penis was evidence that sexual activity was either
about to take place or was taking place. This knowledge, said the
doctor, was not based in science but on his experience as a married man. The other doctor who conducted Aarushi’s autopsy and noted her genital
area as “nothing abnormal detected” testified that he made several
changes to that report without re-examining the body (which had been
cremated). These included a ruptured hymen, a wide vaginal opening and a
“cleaned-up” vagina. The vaginal opening was so wide he could see the canal inside, he
said. A gynecologist for the defence called that a medical
impossibility. The vaginal orifice would not be found open in a dead
body, she said, even if it had been opened and cleaned. To see the canal
would require the labia to be forced open. “Once rigor mortis has just
started or has developed and if someone tries to interfere with the
vaginal cavity or genital organs, then in that area, perimortem injuries
will be caused,” she is recorded as saying. If that were the case, the
doctor could not have written “nothing abnormal detected” in his
original report. Defence counsel Tanveer Ahmed Mir called the testimony of two post-mortem doctors “medical blasphemy.” To prove Aarushi and Hemraj were together in her bedroom, forensic
scientist B.K. Mohapatra, testifying for the prosecution, claimed that
Hemraj’s pillowcase was found in Aarushi’s room. But when the pillowcase was unsealed in court, it exposed a tag that
read, “Pillow and pillow cover, blood stained (from servant’s room).”
That is, it had been taken from Hemraj’s own room. The golf club, the prosecution admitted, had no blood or body fluid
linking it to the murder. But one club, with No. 5 on it, was said to
have less dirt on it than others in the bag; the CBI alleged that was
sign of a “cleanup.” The “triangular-shaped” injuries on both victims
matched the club, they said. However, none of the injuries was described
as being triangular by either of the forensic doctors who conducted the
post-mortems. Meanwhile, a report from the government’s own forensic
lab showed this club was among the dirtier ones and had not been
cleaned. R.K. Sharma, a forensic scientist of repute testifying for the
defence, said an injury from a golf club would have caused a depressed
fracture, not the line fractures noted on both victims. No dental
scalpel was ever presented as evidence, but prosecutors argued that both
dentists had dissected cadavers as undergraduates two decades earlier.
However, Sharma said Rajesh’s dental scalpel, with a cutting edge of 8
mm, would have been too small to create the kind of injury seen in
Aarushi’s neck. British DNA expert Andre Semikhodskii told the court that forensic
scientists had “not connected the accused with the crime in any DNA
report.”
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
Following this excerpt from Shree Paradkar's incisive account of a
brutal miscarriage of justice that shows India's criminal justice system in a terrible light you will find links that will assist in
understanding the case: Aarushi's autopsy, Hemraj’s autopsy, changes to Aarushi’s autopsy and crime-scene analysis. The Judgment;
The entire Ebook excerpt can be found at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
I
have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses
several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of
the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this
powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and
myself get more out of the site.
The
Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible
years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr.
Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of
Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic"
section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It
can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-charles-smith-award-presented-to_28.html
I look forward to hearing from readers at:
hlevy15@gmail.com.
Harold Levy; Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog
