After a remarkable hearing, judges from the Madras High Court deliberated and concluded that the state Director General of Police (DGP) had no prerogative to transfer the investigation of a case from one investigating agency to another after the first agency had already submitted its report to the judiciary succeeding its probe.

The case in hand was booked under Section 354C (voyeurism) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) against two alleged perpetrators for fixing a CCTV camera facing the house of the managing director of Sri Krishna Hi-Tech Management Solutions Private Limited in Coimbatore city.

The FIR for the case was registered in the Race Course police, Coimbatore, under Section 354C of IPC, Section 4 of the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Harassment of Woman Act and Section 66E of the Information Technology Act in 2019. However, in 2021, the DGP instructed the Crime Branch-Criminal Investigation Department (CB-CID) to freshly probe the matter and label the previous investigation as “a mistake of fact.”

During the hearing, Justice G.K. Ilanthiraiyan countermanded the negative final report filed by the CB-CID and instructed the Judicial Magistrate to proceed based on the previous final report filed by the Race Course police. Justice Ilanthiraiyan pontificated that the DGP had no right to order a fresh investigation into the case unless some additional materials had emerged in a particular case after the submission of a final report.