Prayagraj, Feb. 5 -- The Allahabad high court recently acquitted a man, aged around 100 years, 42 years after his conviction in a 1982 murder case, ruling that the prosecution failed to prove the charges beyond reasonable doubt. Ram was convicted in the case in Uttar Pradesh's Hamirpur district on July 24, 1984, and he filed an appeal before the high court the same year. The bench comprising justices Chandra Dhari Singh and Sanjiv Kumar allowed Ram's appeal and further pointed out that the anxiety, uncertainty and social consequences suffered by the accused over decades cannot be ignored while assessing what justice now demands. "When a person stands before the court at the twilight of existence, the insistence on penal consequences, after decades of procedural delay, risks transforming justice into a ritual divorced from the purpose it intends. When the system itself has been unable to deliver finality within a reasonable time, courts are justified in adopting a tempered, human approach while fashioning relief," the court said. As the appellant, Ram, was on bail, the court directed that his bail bond shall stand discharged. "Justice is not an abstraction divorced from human conditions. The law cannot be oblivious to the reality that advancing age brings with its physical fragility, dependence and a narrowing horizon of life. A criminal process that stretches across generations ceases to be only a mechanism of accountability and assumes, in itself, the character of punishment," added the bench. The appellant's counsel submitted that the appellant is about 100 years of age and that he had only been assigned the role of exhortation. It was submitted that the main accused person, who allegedly caused firearm injuries to the deceased, was never arrested by the police. The state counsel, on the other hand, opposed the criminal appeal. However, he also conceded that the accused-appellant is now 100 years old. Analysing the case and evidence, the high court found the two key witnesses' testimonies and documentary evidence fundamentally untrustworthy-riddled with contradictions in the incident's genesis, unbecoming eyewitness conduct, FIR omissions, and inherent improbabilities....