Age no bar for giving testimony: SC

NEW DELHI: In a rare instance, a 12-year-old's vivid description of the manner in which her father was diabolically murdered in the dead of the night by her brother, mother and the latter's lovers helped the court to nail the accused. The girl was the sole witness to the crime. The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected attempts by the accused to exploit the loopholes in the law to discredit her testimony — that she was a minor and her evidence as the sole witness did not inspire confidence. Her mother Ranjana died sometime after the trial court convicted her along with her son and lovers for the murder of her father Babban Misal on the night intervening July 9-10, 1998, in a Maharashtra village. The daughter deposed that her father was objecting to the extra-marital relationship of her mother with the two accused paramours. On the date of the incident, the accused murdered Babban in the house and then put the body in a shawl, stacked salt on it and covered it with gunny bags before burying it in a pit. She said that her mother "washed the blood spilled on the floor with a bucket of water and a cloth and poured it outside the house. After burying the body, all four returned home. The paramours went home and the mother locked the room in which her father was killed and then went to sleep." When the defence counsel challenged the veracity of her statement and questioned whether such a statement from a child witness could be taken as sufficient evidence to convict the accused, an apex court Bench comprising Justices Arijit Pasayat and P Sathasivam said: "Her evidence is as concise and precise and as it is specific and vivid. It is neither embellished nor embroidered. It is the evidence of a child who has seen through the unusual and cruel incidence. She was a girl of tender age who saw the killing of her father by her mother and others." Referring to the provisions of Indian Evidence Act, the Bench said it did not prescribe any particular age as a determinative factor to treat a witness to be a competent one. "On the contrary, Section 118 of the Evidence Act envisages that all persons shall be competent to testify, unless the court considers that they are prevented from understanding the questions put to them or from giving rational answers to those questions, because of tender years, extreme old age, disease — whether mind, or any other cause of the same kind," said Justice Pasayat, writing the judgment for the Bench. A child of tender age could be allowed to testify if she has intellectual capacity to understand questions and give rational answers thereto, the Bench said, rejecting the appeals and upholding the life term imposed on the accused.