With the Supreme Court overturning the acquittal of a rape accused of a minor girl 39 years after the horrific crime, questions are being raised over the slow pace of trials in such cases and also the conduct of the High Court which failed to appreciate the testimony of minor girl.
The woman, who was a minor in 1986, was raped by a 21-year-old man. In November 1987, he was convicted by a trial court and given a seven-year jail term and the High Court decided the appeal filed in 2013 which acquitted him citing the lack of strong statements from prosecution witnesses, including the assaulted child.
The slow pace of the trial
Rape trials in India can proceed at a snail’s pace, dragging on for five to 10 years. Beginning from lodging of police complaints to long trials in courts, it's very complicated for a rape survivor to live through the trauma again and again.
Another worrisome aspect is that the conviction rate in rape cases has increased marginally in recent years. The charge-sheeting rate has gone down as well.
Despite the laws in place, basic investigations, shoddy forensics and badly drafted chargesheets are a few of the reasons why trials in rape cases take such a long time.
The conduct of the High Court wasn’t correct
A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Justice Sanjay Karol overturned the Rajasthan High Court's judgment and expressed surprise at the manner in which the High Court in a six-page order, set aside the well-considered judgment of the trial court merely on the ground of silence of the child victim during the examination and said high court was expected to independently assess the evidence before confirming or disturbing the findings of the court below.
The Court also criticised the High Court for revealing the name of the victim in the judgment.
'Testimony of child witness crucial but her silence doesn’t mean to favour accused '
"It is a matter of great sadness that this minor girl and her family have to go through nearly four decades of life, waiting to close this horrific chapter of her/their lives," the Court said in its judgment.
“The child witness (victim), it is true, has not deposed anything about the commission of the offence against her. When asked about the incident, the trial Judge records that 'V' was silent, and upon being further asked, only shed silent tears and nothing more. Nothing could be elicited from the testimony regarding the commission of the offence. This, in our view, cannot be used as a factor in favour of the respondent. The tears of 'V', have to be understood for what they are worth. This silence cannot accrue to the benefit of the respondent. The silence here is that of a child. It cannot be equated with the silence of a fully realised adult prosecutrix, which again would have to be weighed in its own circumstances,” the judgement reads.
“In almost all other cases, the testimony of the prosecutrix is present and forms an essential part of the conviction of an accused, but at the same time, there is no hard and fast rule that in the absence of such a statement a conviction cannot stand, particularly when other evidence, medical and circumstantial, is available pointing to such a conclusion,” the judgement added.
The top court noted that the prosecutrix was a child at the time of the incident and remained silent during her testimony, shedding only tears and held that her silence could not be used in favour of the accused, as it was a result of trauma.
The judgement cited precedents and emphasised that while a child witness's testimony requires careful scrutiny, it can serve as the foundation for a conviction if deemed credible and the inability of a child to testify due to valid reasons does not automatically absolve the accused of liability.
