New Delhi: It was a “sham and premeditated investigation” and “a sham prosecution” that led to a son and his wife being wrongly convicted and spending eight years in jail for allegedly murdering their aged parents and now the Supreme Court has acquitted them.Referring to various lapses in the investigation and trial proceedings which led to two innocent people languishing in jail, a bench of Justice Sanjay Kumar comprising Vinod Chandran cautioned the police and courts to strictly follow the accepted procedural rules when lives are lost or taken and when there is a possibility of false allegations jeopardizing the dignity of living people.“Overzealous investigation is as fatal to the prosecution as dull and sloppy one. Deciding a case on the basis of public perceptions and personal prejudices leads to confusion, often endangering an innocent and always leaving the culprit free. Here, we have a case of gruesome death of a couple when their house was gutted in a fire, in which the son and daughter-in-law were accused of murder. The whole case is based on motive; the grudge that the son held against the father The entire village was against the son for not giving him his due share in the ancestral property and the mishap culminated in an investigation where truth was sacrificed on the altar of alleged vendetta, the selective but careless activities of the investigating officer derailed the entire prosecution.”Advocate Smrhar Singh, appearing for the elder brother of the accused, tried to convince the court that his younger brother and his wife were guilty and this was also proved by the dying declarations of the deceased couple. But the bench said that the dying declaration is not reliable as it has not been recorded as per law.“The investigation, according to us, was a sham and pre-meditated, flouting every principle of criminal jurisprudence informed by due process. Therefore, the prosecution was a sham, producing witnesses whose testimony failed. The investigation and prosecution were based on the alleged motive and nothing more,” the bench said.