Paramjit Singh Bedi v. State of Punjab
Background
In 2009, a young woman accompanied the appellant, a family acquaintance, first to a flat in Ludhiana for two days and then, on a scooter, to another town, Malerkotla, where they stayed together until they were intercepted by police and her father five to six days after she first left home. She alleged she had been kept confined and raped during this period. The trial court acquitted the appellant of kidnapping/abduction (holding she was a major who went along willingly) but convicted him of rape, and the High Court upheld the conviction; the appellant had already served over 6 years in custody by the time he was granted bail in 2015.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court found the lower courts' reasoning self-contradictory: having disbelieved the prosecutrix's account enough to acquit the appellant of kidnapping/abduction (accepting she went along voluntarily, did not raise any alarm despite many opportunities in crowded streets and on trains, and was not confined against her will), the same courts could not then selectively accept the very same witness's account to convict him of rape. The Court held that a witness's testimony must be accepted or rejected as a whole for connected charges arising from the same set of facts. There cannot be "part acceptance, part rejection." Given the multiple, serious contradictions in her evidence (including conflicting accounts of how they travelled back) and the absence of any injury on medical examination, the Court held the conviction under Section 376 IPC could not be sustained, set aside both the trial court's and the High Court's judgments, and acquitted the appellant.
Lesson Learnt
A court cannot pick and choose parts of a witness's testimony to convict on one charge while rejecting the same testimony to acquit on a closely related charge arising from the same facts. If the witness's account is unreliable for one charge, that unreliability cannot simply be set aside for a more serious, connected charge.