In a capital case with a jail appeal filed before the Allahabad High Court against a judgment and order dated 05/10-07-2025 by the Additional District and Sessions Judge, Auraiya, whereby the appellants were convicted under Sections 302 read with Section 120-B of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (IPC), sentencing them to life imprisonment with fine, and further sentencing the first appellant to death under Section 302, a Division Bench of Justice Siddhartha Varma and Justice Jai Krishna Upadhyay set aside the impugned order and acquitted the appellants.
On 27-06-2024 at around 05:00 AM, three children died and information of their death was conveyed to the police by the Gram Pradhan. The information was recorded in the G.D. but not treated as an FIR. Thereafter, the police proceeded to the spot, the bridge over the Sengur River, recovered the dead bodies, and conducted panchayatnamas and post-mortems before any F.I.R. was lodged. Later that day, an FIR was lodged by uncle of the deceased children, alleging that the mother of the children in collusion the other appellant had taken her four sons to the river and attempted to drown them, with one son escaping. It was alleged that the motive was an illicit relationship between the two appellants who wished to be rid of the children.
At trial, seven prosecution witnesses were examined. Contradictions emerged in the testimony, particularly regarding who first gave information to the police, whether the site plan was prepared on the pointing of the Pradhan or of the informant, and the timing of PW-2’s statement, which was recorded only on 05-07-2024 rather than on the date of the incident. The appellants argued that the child witness, was unreliable, that his presence at the scene was doubtful, that there was every possibility of tutoring between 27-06-2024 and 05-07-2024, that the informant’s conduct and statements were inconsistent, and that the Pradhan, being a material witness, was withheld from the Court, warranting an adverse inference. It was further argued that the findings of the Trial Court were perverse and that the case did not fall within the ‘rarest of rare’ category warranting death sentence.
Referring to the statutory scheme, the Court said that a child of tender age is not automatically disqualified from testifying in a court of law and that competency is a legal presumption, but credibility is a question of fact that must be established through rigorous judicial scrutiny. It was said that while a child witness may possess the technical competency to depose under Section 118 of the Evidence Act, it is important to cautious as children are impressionable, imaginative and highly vulnerable to external suggestions, coaching, and tutoring.
The Court found irreconcilable contradictions in the child’s testimony and said that it exhibited clear hallmarks of tutoring, rendering it wholly unsafe to form the sole basis of conviction. It was said that where the core of a child witness’s deposition is infected by tutoring and contradictions, the entirety of such oral evidence must be rejected as unconvincing. Testing the prosecution’s narrative under Section 114 of the Evidence Act, the Court found it to be improbable that the mother executed a cold-blooded killing of her three children and spared the 8-year-old, leaving him unharmed to act as an eyewitness against her.
It was stated that if an accused mother had indeed succumbed to criminal intent to eliminate her offspring, it defies basic logic and human behaviour that she would spare the eldest child who was fully capable of speaking, observing, and implicating her. Further, the Court noted that the informant was also not a reliable witness as his conduct was unnatural.
The Court said that the law demands a party to produce the most direct and highest degree of evidence available within its possession to prove a contested fact and if a material witness who could unfold the true genesis of the incident is deliberately or negligently withheld, the court is entitled to draw an adverse inference against the prosecution. It was inferred that had the Pradhan been produced and subjected to cross-examination, his testimony would not have supported the prosecution narrative, or would have exposed the true genesis of the incident, which might have been entirely different from the version put forward by the police.
It was noted that the lapses committed by the IO were of such a fundamental and pervasive nature that they struck at the very root of the prosecution’s case. The Court said that the deliberate failure to record the statement of the child witness on the day of the incident itself, conflicting statement as to on whose pointing out the site plan was prepared, non-lodging of FIR on the application moved by the Pradhan, though a cognizable offence was disclosed and GD entry was also made pursuant to the said application, etc. shakes the root of the prosecution case and creates doubt about its credibility.
Hence, the Court concluded that the prosecution had miserably failed to establish the guild of both accused guilt beyond reasonable doubt as the conviction rested on the uncorroborated and tutored testimony of a child witness, coupled with a fatal failure to produce the best available evidence, and investigative lapses. Accordingly, the capital appeal and the jail appeal were allowed while the reference by the trial court was answered.
Thus, the impugned judgment and order dated 05/10-07-2025 was set aside, the appellants were acquitted and ordered to be released, if not wanted in any other case.
