New Delhi:

A woman’s gangrape complaint against two men failed the Supreme Court’s scrutiny 28 years after the alleged incident, leading to the acquittal of the duo who were sentenced to 10 years by the trial court and the Orissa high court.

The woman, it was found from the cross-examination and testimonies, had a fight with the duo and accused them of rape out of vengeance in 1990. She alleged that the evening after the fight, the men had dragged her to a field by the side of a busy road where a weekly market was in progress. She claimed she had confided in her husband about the sexual assault and had gone to police station around 11am the next day to file an FIR. She had said her petticoat was stained with semen and she had sustained bruises.

Grave miscarriage of justice for duo accused of rape: SC

The SC bench of Justices N V Ramana and Mohan Shantanagoudar found on Wednesday from the forensic report that the petticoat had no trace of semen and the medical report found no injuries on her body except a half centimeter bruise on her right cheek. The bruise alone was not sufficient to establish rape, the bench said.

During cross-examination, the husband attested to his wife’s fight with the two accused. With regard to the rape, however, he deposed that while he had accompanied his wife to the police station a day after the alleged sexual assault, he had no knowledge of the complaint filed by her.

The two men were sentenced to 10 years by the lower court in 1992. The ruling was upheld by the high court in 2017. The duo spent two years in jail.

Writing the judgment acquitting the accused, Justice Shantanagoudar said the husband’s deposition did not support the woman’s version. “There is no reason why the husband of the victim would contradict her version. The evidence of the victim/prosecutrix and her husband are unreliable and untrustworthy inasmuch as they are not credible witnesses. Their evidence bristles with contradictions and is full of improbabilities,” he said.

“We cannot resist putting on record that the prosecution has tried to rope in the appellants (accused) merely on assumptions, surmises and conjectures. The story of the prosecution is built on material placed on record, which seems to be neither the truth nor wholly the truth. The findings of the courts below, though concurrent, do not merit acceptance or approval in our hands with regard to the glaring infirmities and illegalities vitiating them, and the patent errors apparent on the face of record, resulting in serious and grave miscarriage of justice to the appellants,” the bench said.

“We are of the clear opinion that the prosecutrix apparently had a motive to seek revenge against the accused persons. The testimony of the victim in the peculiar facts and circumstances of this case needs to be discarded since her testimony is a result of seeking revenge against the accused and her evidence is not free from blemish,” it added.