The Nanavati Trial

A naval officer learns his wife is having an affair, gets his own service revolver on a false pretext, drives to confront the other man, and three shots later the man is dead. A jury looked at those facts in 1959 Bombay and said “not guilty”. What happened next — a judge overturning that verdict, and the case ending up before the Supreme Court — is the reason India stopped trusting juries with criminal trials at all.

In two minutes

K.M. Nanavati v. State of Maharashtra was a 1959 case in which Naval Commander K.M. Nanavati was tried for the murder of Prem Ahuja, his wife's lover; a jury acquitted him, the Bombay High Court set that verdict aside and convicted him of murder in a retrial, and the case became the reason jury trials were phased out of Indian criminal law.

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