Citing procedural errors for rejecting the DNA report that led to his conviction as "credible evidence," the Gujarat High Court has cleared a father who was given the death penalty by a Surat trial court for the rape and murder of his pregnant teenage daughter.
The case concerns a 14-year-old Odisha migrant girl whose body was discovered on the Dumas beach in Surat on June 29, 2017.
She was pregnant and had been strangled to death, according to an autopsy. The prosecution utilized the fetus's and the accused's DNA to establish the "cornerstone" of his January 2020 conviction under the IPC and the Pocso Act following her father's arrest based on circumstantial evidence.
The state government's request for the high court to uphold the death penalty completely changed the course of the case. The division bench of Justices Ilesh Vora and R T Vachhani declared, "The prosecution failed to prove all necessary circumstances by reliable and clinching evidence, which would constitute a complete chain without a snap, as would permit a conclusion other than the one of the accused's guilt."
The judges determined that the accused's and the victim's unborn child's DNA samples may have been "compromised" as a result of several mistakes, such as the failure to store extremely delicate biological material in an ice box and the 13-day delay in sending them to the designated forensic laboratory.
