Finally a Charge Sheet

September 2011

On the 24^th of August Caroline told me that I would have to go to the court to pick up the charge sheet.  The next morning I tried in vain to get a hold of Vijeta and Caroline was out of the office.  Vijeta texted back at 10am saying that I should call one of the senior lawyers, Raju.  I couldn’t get a hold of him until 1:30pm, just as I was finishing lunch at a beachside restaurant in Arambol.  He asked if I could be in the Panjim court at 2:30pm.  What?!?  You’re kidding me...I’ve been waiting almost 300 days for this charge sheet and now you’re giving me an hour to be in court which is about an hour’s scooter ride plus I’d need to rent a scooter and put gas in it first.  Come on.  Raju revised it to 3pm so I quickly paid my bill, hired a bike and was off to Panjim.

I arrived at the Sessions Court in Panjim, a large three storey building painted in royal blue.  While waiting for Raju in the main foyer, Sachin, the police sub-inspector who falsified the report in my case walked by me a couple of times within a few feet of me.  I stared at him but either he didn’t see me or was avoiding me.  Raju came out and told me to head up two flights of stairs at the back of the building to Judge Nutan’s court.  Although the outside of the courthouse was a big improvement over the one in Mapsa, the inside did have a few areas that were pretty dingy and dirty. 

The Sessions Courthouse in Panjim:

Entering the courtroom, there was already a witness on the stand off to the left side of the judge.  There were about ten rows of stiff, upright chairs on either side of the middle aisle.  A wooden banister divided the gallery from the area for the advocates, stenographer and other court assistants.  Half a dozen fans coupled with all of the open windows attempted to keep the room at a comfortable temperature but they seemed to be losing the battle.  The judge was an overweight woman in her late 40s with big round glasses.  I could tell right away that she was a no nonsense type person.

The witness turned out to be a medical doctor who was listing off a myriad of injuries to the victim.  It was a slow process describing the locations and lengths of lacerations and contusions which were then repeated by the judge for recording by the stenographer.  I eventually heard the words “deceased” and “her” so I assumed it was a murder case of a woman.  I finally clued in that there were two accused sitting in a small cordoned off area on the right front side of the courtroom.  One looked to be about 25 years old while the other was in his mid 40s.

The doctor claimed that the victim died from asphyxiation and said that he could correlate one of the injuries with one of the accused as he was “polydettal”.  I made a mental note of this unknown word to look it up later.  They called the older of the two accused men over to the witness box and asked him to raise his right hand.  What the doctor had really meant was “polydactyl”...as the man’s hand had 2 thumbs.  So the bruises around the neck of the victim matched those that would be created by a two thumbed killer!  Insane, what am I doing in the same courtroom as these people?  I hadn’t even lit the joint I was rolling so I didn’t even give anyone harm from second hand smoke!

Close to 5pm, the ending time for the afternoon court session, I was called up to the accused box as Raju was bringing up the issue that the 25,000 rupee bond for my Manali trip back in May had still not been released.  Wait, I thought I was here for my charge sheet...no, come back for that in four days son.

On August 29^th I went to the court at 2:30pm and while waiting for my matter to come up, I sat through another bit of a murder case.  This time it was a police officer on the witness stand and he was detailing how a man had gone to see a female friend, they took a bus somewhere, had sex and then he choked her for her jewellery valued at a mere 34,000 rupees ($680)...how sad, life is cheap over here.

Vijeta was there to represent me along with another client.  She was finished with all of her matters with the judge and told me to wait to receive my copy of the charge sheet from one of the clerks at the front of the courtroom.  Ten minutes later, the clerk beckoned me to come up by the judge’s desk to sign for it while the court proceedings continued.  The clerk made a motion with her hands and I thought she meant for me to sit down so I did, in a lawyer’s chair.  Judge Nutan immediately scolded me.  I said sorry but forgot the “your honour” part and immediately stood up, signed the form and sheepishly returned to the gallery.  Good first impression with the judge Dave!

The clerk had pointed to a piece of paper when I was receiving the charge sheet that said that my next court date was November 1^st, over two months away.

So I finally received this document infamously known as the “charge sheet”.  What was in it?  Well to quickly sum it up, a lot of BS.  It was 30 pages of legal sized paper with lots of the pages double sided.  It listed ten witnesses for the police: the three patrolling officers, another policeman who supposedly performed the weighing and packaging of the charas on the beach (which never happened), another policeman who would have been the middleman to the FDA, a scientific assistant at the FDA, two “panch” witnesses and of course the main star, the sub-inspector Sachin Narvekar who embellished the case.  The panch witnesses are supposed to be people of good standing in the community but I had no clue who these people were.  They were purportedly there when I was being searched, as third party independent witnesses.  In fact they are just paid a couple thousand rupees ($40) to show up in court and commit perjury.

A lot of the charge sheet was repetitious.  There was a statement from Sachin that states that he noticed me standing suspiciously next to the “Buddha” restaurant (which is the restaurant next to where I was arrested...but I wasn’t standing around) at 9:50pm yet it was actually 7:30pm when I was arrested.  So he approached me, I tried to run then he asked me what I was up to and I had no good answer.   He then introduced me to the two panch witnesses and asked me if I wanted to search them and the police (to prevent any planting of narcotics) and I declined.  On searching me they found 23 individual packages of hash in a tissue like paper in my pocket.  He called for a cop to come out from the police station with a weighing and sealing kit and they packaged up the evidence right there on the beach with “sufficient light”.  This complete statement is copied, hardly altered and then the different names of the police officers and panch witnesses are slapped on them for their piece of the complaint.  I couldn’t understand why they had bothered to fabricate so much of it.  Why not at least get the time and the place correct?

The FDA report lists the individual weights of the 23 packages and they are all completely different, ranging from 2 grams up to 32 grams.  If I was some kind of dealer, I wouldn’t be a very good one.  I thought it was also interesting that none of them correlate to what I was caught with.  I had bought a “tola” which is 10 grams and is the smallest amount you can normally buy here.  I had broken some of that off to make a joint but the closest to 10 grams is either 7.32 grams or 11.43 grams.  Obviously these were all pieces that the police had confiscated from other tourists from whom they had received bribes.

 One thing that scared me with the charge sheet which caused me to lose some sleep over the ensuing weekend was that my signature was on one form called the Property Seizure Memo.  When I was in the police station that first night I recall signing a few forms that I should have more carefully read first but I was frazzled.  Sachin claimed that one was for the fact that they were confiscating my passport and another was that I was being placed under custody.  Well I think he conned me by only partially filling out this memo before obtaining my signature as the front side listed data like my name, address along with that of the two panch witnesses and then on the back there’s a box filled in saying that they are submitting a sealed envelope with 210 grams of charas.  There are designated places for the officer and the two panch witnesses to sign but then all by its own at the bottom of the sheet is my signature.  For sure I didn’t sign with that information written above on the form.

My lawyers told me not to worry as they had tried and tested methods for dealing with the signatures that were obtained while I was under duress.  They also stated that they saw many holes and inconsistencies in the way the charges were presented so I was not to worry.  The majority of the cases that they defend in court are dismissed based on technicalities, mistakes made by the police in not following standard procedure.  It is best if it doesn’t become a “he said, she said” type of affair as the police have ten witnesses versus my two (the French couple I was with who provided written affidavits).

I guess I have to trust the experts...