Trial Courts Consistently Failing to Perform Duties as a Judge, Despite Training: Madhya Pradesh HC
According to the case study, the alleged victim and the accused had known each other for a year.
Bhopal: Madhya Pradesh high court has observed that the trial courts are consistently failing to perform their duties as a judge.
Setting aside the trial court’s verdict convicting a man accused in a Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) case, a division bench of the high court comprising Justices Vivek Agrawal and Avinandra Kumar Singh pulled up the trial court for having failed to take ‘cognizance of ossification test report available on record’ and observed, “despite regular training in the Madhya Pradesh State Judicial Academy, learned trial courts are consistently failing to perform their duties as a judge’.
The high court held that the trial court had neither taken the ossification test report into consideration nor posed questions to the accused under the relevant provisions of law on the basis of the DNA test report.
The trial court had convicted the man in the POCSO case and sentenced him to 20-year rigorous imprisonment.
According to the case study, the alleged victim and the accused had known each other for a year.
The man had proposed to the alleged victim who had accepted the proposal.
They had then traveled to Hyderabad where they performed the necessary rituals in a Durga temple and later established physical relationship in a hotel.
The appellant in the case said that the physical relationship was consensual and the alleged victim was an adult.
He argued that the prosecution dishonestly did not exhibit the documents that favoured him.
The high court noted that the victim during her cross-examination had admitted that she had left her parents’ home without informing them and that she took the name of the appellant for the first time ‘out of fear of her parents’.
