To ensure complete justice to the rape victims whose cases are often weakened at the time of registration of FIR by the police under “influence” of the powerful accused, the Supreme Court in an important judgment has held that the FIR was not a “substantive” evidence in rape cases.
“It is needless to restate that the FIR does not constitute substantive evidence. It can, however, only be used as a previous statement for the purpose of either corroborating its maker or for contradicting her and in such a case the statement cannot be used unless the attention of the victim has first been drawn to those parts (of FIR) by which it is proposed to contradict her evidence,” a bench of Justices B. Sudershan Reddy and Aftab Alam said.
The top court said unlike the FIR, a statement made by the victim before the magistrate under Section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) was of far greater value so far as the “contradiction or corroboration” of her statement during the cross-examination was concerned. “It can be used to impeach the credibility of the witness (victim).”
The question related to the comparative values of the statements of sexual assault victim made to the police and to the magistrate arose in a case of gang rape of a woman from West Bengal, abducted by five men while going home around 8 pm in a rickshaw on April 28, 1984.
The prosecution had charged Utpal Das and Haradhan of raping her in an under-construction building where she was taken after threatening the rickshaw-puller as well as her with knife. The woman, a mother of two children, was rescued from their clutches after the rickshaw-puller collected his friends and went in the search of her.
The trial court had acquitted all the accused on the ground that there was a lot of “contradictions” in the statement of the woman to the police.