Supreme Court sets free woman in case of killing her two children

New Delhi: Twenty two years after a woman was accused of killing her two-year-old son and four-month-old daughter, the Supreme Court has set her free by setting aside the Chhattisgarh High Court's judgment which upheld her conviction and sentence of life term in the murder case.

A bench of Chief Justice of India B R Gavai and Justice K Vinod Chandran held her conviction, as recorded by the trial court and affirmed by the high court was totally based on conjectures and surmises.

The court found the prosecution has examined nine witnesses in the case, but the conviction was based solely on the evidence of a beetel shop owner, who allegedly saw her going towards the pond where the bodies of the two kids were found floating minutes thereafter on October 11, 2003.

The bench, however, described his evidence as "totally contradictory and therefore totally unworthy."

The court pointed out, the cross-examination of this witness would reveal that his statement in examination in chief is a complete improvement than what was stated by him in his police statement. Whatever he narrated before the court does not find place in his police statement, the bench noted.

The court also said, the prosecution has not even examined a rickshaw puller who was also stated to have seen the appellant going towards the pond and the children floating over there.

"The testimony of beetel shop owner being unreliable, at the most, can be treated as hearsay evidence," the court held.

In her statement, the woman claimed she was innocent as she was in a state of tension because her husband Kanhaiya Lal Kharre had performed a second marriage.

The court allowed the appeal filed by Shail Kumari against the Chhattisgarh High Court's 2010 judgment which confirmed the decision of a Durg court holding her guilty in the case.

In its August 6, 2025 judgment authored by the CJI, the court also referred to Vadivelu Thevar versus State of Madras (1957), which classified the witnesses into three types: wholly reliable, wholly unreliable, and neither wholly reliable nor wholly unreliable.

The bench pointed out, it has been held that in the first category of cases, there is no difficulty inasmuch as if the testimony of such witness is found to be fully reliable, it may convict or may acquit on the basis of his statement.

It said, even in the second category cases, there is no difficulty that if evidence of such a witness is found to be wholly unreliable, the testimony must be discarded.

"The difficulty arises only in the case of third type of witnesses, where the court is required to separate the chaff from grain to arrive at a conclusion," the bench said.

In the case, the court pointed out, apart from the testimony of the beetel shop owner, there was nothing to connect the appellant with the crime in question.