While rejecting High Court’s ‘criminal test at zero per cent’ approach, the Supreme Court has upheld the conviction under Section 376AB IPC and Sections 5/6 POCSO Act on corroborated testimony of mother, medical evidence, call detail records, victim’s disclosure and extra-judicial confession. At the same time, the Court emphasised that where the possibility of reformation is not excluded and the State leads no evidence of incorrigibility, the intermediate sentence of imprisonment for the remainder of natural life is adequate to meet the ends of justice.
The Apex Court commutes the death sentence to imprisonment for the remainder of natural life without remission, applying the intermediate sentencing option recognised in the case of Union of India vs. V. Sriharan [(2016) 7 SCC 1], because the State failed to lead any evidence to establish that the accused was beyond the possibility of reform. The Court reaffirmed that under the case of Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab [(1980) 2 SCC 684], the burden lies on the State to prove that the accused is beyond reformation, and where the State leads no such evidence, the alternative of life imprisonment is not foreclosed.
The Court corrected the High Court’s approach of assessing the criminal test at zero per cent, holding that a sentencing court that reduces the criminal test to zero has, in truth, declined to perform the weighing at all, and that mitigating circumstances such as childhood deprivation, absence of criminal antecedents, and satisfactory conduct in custody must be given generous weight.
The Court upheld the reliability of the mother’s testimony despite attacks on omissions, contradictions, and conduct, holding that the silence and continued cohabitation of an abused woman are consistent with the tragically common experience of victims of domestic abuse and are not indicia of fabrication.
A Larger Bench comprising Justice Vikram Nath, Justice Sandeep Mehta and Justice Vijay Bishnoi observed that the medical evidence furnished an objective substratum independently establishing a homicidal death by throttling and a recent sexual assault, against which the ocular testimony of the mother fell to be tested. The mother’s account was found to be reliable at its core, and was corroborated by the call detail record, the disclosure of the victim which was admissible under Section 32(1) and Section 6 of the Evidence Act, the extra-judicial confession made by the appellant to the family of the deceased, and the incriminating conduct of the appellant.
The Court rejected each of the five attacks mounted upon the credibility of the mother, namely the alleged material omissions, the alleged internal contradictions, the alleged unnatural conduct, the call detail record, and the alleged contradiction with the sister-in-law of the mother of the victim, and the theory of false implication. The Court held that the conduct of the mother was not that of a willing participant but of a woman held in a condition of entrapment, and that her silence and continued cohabitation were consistent with the tragically common experience of abused women and not indicia of fabrication.
The DNA evidence was treated as corroborative and not foundational, and the plea of alibi was found to be no alibi at all because it did not cover the time of the murder. The defects alleged in the investigation were held not to vitiate the prosecution case, which stood established upon trustworthy evidence, added the Bench.
Briefly, the appellant, Waris, was the step-father of a six-year-old girl child (victim). The mother of the victim, who was the wife of the appellant and the sole eyewitness to the events, deposed that the appellant subjected the child to repeated sexual assault within the matrimonial home at village Kushalgarh and thereafter throttled her to death on April 23, 2018. The medical evidence established that the death was homicidal and was caused by asphyxia due to throttling, and a fresh tear at the fourchette with oozing of blood was found at the post-mortem examination, indicative of recent penetrative sexual assault.
The Trial Court and the High Court convicted the appellant under Sections 302, 376(2)(f), 376(2)(n), 376AB and 201 of the IPC and Sections 5 and 6 of the POCSO Act, and imposed the sentence of death, which was confirmed by the High Court. An unusual feature of the trial was that the cross-examination of the mother had been conducted by a legal aid counsel appointed on the very day her testimony was recorded, prompting the Supreme Court, by its order dated May 08, 2025, to direct a further cross-examination of the mother, which was carried out on June 14, 2025.
