JOIN USThe Supreme Court has held that a witness who makes a substantial change in his statement during the criminal trial cannot not be relied upon by courts until there is an independent corroboration of his version.
A bench of justices T S Thakur and Gyan Sudha Misra made the ruling while acquitting three men—Shanmugam, Velu and Sampath Kumar—of the charges of killing Senthil Kumar after noting key witness Palani had made “significant improvement” in his statement. “It was only five years after the occurrence that the witness for the first time disclosed in the court the story about his having seen the appellants standing near the deceased when the former woke up on account of the noise of a stone falling hard on the ground. The witness did not offer any explanation, much less a cogent and acceptable one for his silence for such a long period.
“His assertion that he was scared by the appellants even after they had been taken into custody by the police and, therefore, did not reveal anything about the actual events till he had the courage to come to the court to make a statement, is hard to believe. At any rate, reliance upon the deposition of a witness who has made such a material improvement in his version is wholly unsafe unless it is corroborated by some other independent evidence that may probabilise his version,” the Bench said.
The prosecution tried to prove its case on the basis of the statement of Palani, who claimed to have seen the accused near the deceased on the intervening night of July 28-29, 2002 just after the incident in Krishnagiri district. Palani was a common friend of the accused as well as the deceased.
The Bench set aside the Madras High Court order of April 30, 2009, upholding the conviction and life term of the three accused.