Chandigarh, July 7 -- A Special NDPS Court in Chandigarh convicted a Delhi woman for possessing 200gm of heroin, holding that the prosecution had successfully proved the recovery and maintained an unbroken chain of custody of the contraband despite several procedural objections raised by the defence. Special court judge Raman Goklaney convicted Nina, a resident of Burari, Delhi, under Section 21(b) of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act. The court sentenced her to two years' rigorous imprisonment and imposed a fine of Rs.10,000, with one month's simple imprisonment in default of payment. According to the prosecution, a police party laid a naka near Furniture Market Chowk in Chandigarh on November 20, 2020, when the accused, carrying a pink shoulder bag, allegedly turned back on noticing the police and attempted to throw away a polythene packet. The packet was recovered and found to contain 200 grams of heroin. The sample was later sent to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL), which confirmed the presence of heroin. During the trial, the defence sought acquittal on multiple grounds, including the absence of independent public witnesses, alleged violation of mandatory safeguards under Section 50 of the NDPS Act, non-examination of the lady constables who intercepted the accused, discrepancies in the prosecution's timeline, delay in sending the sample for forensic examination, and the contention that the accused was formally arrested after sunset without prior permission of a magistrate. Rejecting these arguments, the court held that the recovery witnesses gave consistent and reliable accounts of the incident and that there was no evidence of any motive for the police officials to falsely implicate the accused. It observed that merely because no independent witness joined the proceedings did not render the prosecution case unreliable when the official witnesses were found to be trustworthy. The court also ruled that the safeguards under Section 50 of the NDPS Act were not attracted in the case because the heroin was recovered from a polythene bag taken out of the accused's shoulder bag and not from her in person. Relying on a Supreme Court (SC) judgment, the court held that Section 50 applies only to personal searches and not to the search of bags or other articles carried by an accused. On the defence argument regarding the arrest of a woman after sunset, the court observed that the accused had been apprehended before sunset and that the subsequent completion of formal arrest procedures in the evening did not invalidate the recovery. It further held that a chance recovery under the NDPS Act constituted an exceptional circumstance requiring immediate police action. The court further held that the non-examination of the lady constables did not weaken the prosecution's case, observing that criminal cases are decided on the quality rather than the quantity of evidence and that their testimony would have been merely corroborative. The court also observed that minor discrepancies of about 20 to 30 minutes in the witnesses' timelines were natural and did not affect the core prosecution case. Concluding that the prosecution had proved beyond reasonable doubt that the accused was in conscious possession of heroin and that the chain of custody remained intact from seizure to forensic examination, the court convicted Nina under Section 21(b) of the NDPS Act....