Allahabad High Court spares woman sentenced to death for killing her 3 children

Justices Siddhartha Varma and Jai Krishna Upadhyay passed the order on September 22.

Why court ordered acquittal

The case related to the deaths of three children, whose bodies were recovered from a river in Auraiya on June 27, 2024. According to the prosecution, the woman had taken her four sons to the river, along with the younger brother of her husband, and allegedly attempted to drown them. The eldest child, then around eight years old, reportedly survived by pretending to be dead and later informed the authorities about the incident.

The trial court had convicted both the accused. While the woman was awarded the death penalty, her alleged accomplice was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The high court found the testimony of the child who survived not enough to be the sole basis for conviction. “A child of tender age can easily be swayed by surviving relatives, police officers, or village elders into believing or reciting a specific narrative. Consequently, the testimony of a child witness must be approached with extraordinary circumspection and care,” it said.

The court observed that the testimony of the 8-year-old witness suffered from contradictions and showed clear hallmarks of tutoring, rendering it wholly unsafe to form the sole basis of conviction. It said that the internal contents of the child’s testimony showed that the child was an easy prey to tutoring and was swayed by the influence of adult relatives.

“The narrative provided by the child appears artificially structured and lacks the natural spontaneity expected from an 8-year-old child who allegedly witnessed a tragic traumatic incident involving his own mother and siblings. It is settled law that where the core of a child witness’s deposition is infected by tutoring and contradictions, the entirety of such oral evidence must be rejected as unconvincingde,” the order noted.

The bench said the village pradhan was an “important witness” because it was his application that set the criminal investigation in motion. “The examination of the Pradhan was absolutely vital to supply the genesis of the incident and to corroborate how the crime was first disclosed. This omission leaves an unbridgeable gap in the prosecution case,” it noted.

Observing that the prosecution miserably failed to establish the guilt of both the accused, the high court set aside their conviction and sentence and ordered their release, if not wanted in any other case.