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Vahitha vs State of Tamil Nadu

Criminal Appeal · 2023 INSC 151Decided 22 Feb 2023
Criminal Appeal No. 762 of 2012
Dinesh Maheshwari · Bela M. Trivedi

Background

The appellant, whose husband worked abroad, had been living with her father at Kolakkudi and was brought on 18 June 2007 to her mother-in-law's house at Perambalur so that her five-year-old daughter could be schooled there. The prosecution said she resented being made to stay and, on the morning of 21 June 2007 while her mother-in-law had stepped out to buy idlis, strangled the child with the end of her saree; neighbours and relatives found her with the dead child and she was arrested that evening at the Perambalur bus stand. The post-mortem confirmed death by strangulation with a fractured thyroid cartilage. The Sessions Court (Mahila Court, Perambalur) convicted her of murder and sentenced her to life imprisonment, and the Madras High Court affirmed; only her father testified in her defence, claiming she had been with him at Kolakkudi.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal. It found the "last seen" circumstance firmly established: independent neighbours (PW-4 and PW-5) as well as family witnesses placed the appellant alone with the child at the time of the incident, and she was arrested in the same town within hours. The father's alibi story was rejected as unproved and inconsistent with the rest of the record. The discrepancies in the 65-year-old mother-in-law's account (whether she took money for idlis, whether the accused ran away) were held to be natural lapses of memory after a year, not grounds to discard the entire prosecution case, applying the principle that minor contradictions do not undermine reliable evidence. Since the child was last seen alive only with the appellant, Section 106 of the Evidence Act required her to explain how the death occurred, and her bare denial under Section 313 CrPC weighed heavily against her. The plea that it was at most culpable homicide due to a quarrel with the mother-in-law was rejected, as a domestic quarrel is not "grave and sudden provocation."

Lesson Learnt

When a victim is last seen alive in the sole custody of the accused and the accused offers no explanation of what happened, the law (Section 106, Evidence Act) lets the court draw the inference against them. An alibi must be proved convincingly by the accused, and small inconsistencies in an elderly witness's testimony will not by themselves rescue an accused where independent witnesses corroborate the core facts.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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