The first thing she told a doctor, under police escort, was that nobody had assaulted her
Thirteen years after conviction, the Delhi High Court sets it aside: an MLC history that contradicted the charge, a forensic report that found no blood on clothes said to be soaked in it, and an age proved by a school register nobody could vouch for.
The earliest document in a sexual assault case is usually the medico-legal certificate, and the history it records is taken before anybody has had time to think about the case. That is what gives it weight, and it is also why a history that contradicts the charge is difficult for a prosecution to absorb.
On 23 September 2026 Justice Vimal Kumar Yadav allowed an appeal against a conviction of 2013, on a record where the MLC was only the first of several documents pointing the same way.
The conviction under appeal
Shahbuddin was convicted on 19 July 2013 by the Additional Sessions Judge, Special Fast Track Court, Karkardooma, in a case arising out of FIR No. 307/2010 at Police Station Shahdara, for offences under Sections 363, 368 read with 366, 376 and 506 of the Indian Penal Code. He was sentenced to concurrent terms — three years under Section 363, five years under Section 368 read with 366, and the sentences for the remaining offences — with fines and default stipulations.
Mr. Sunil Kumar appeared for the appellant; Mr. Satinder Singh Bawa, APP, for the State; and Ms. Astha of the Delhi High Court Legal Services Committee for the prosecutrix.
The medico-legal history
The MLC recorded that the prosecutrix denied any sexual contact and any physical or sexual assault, and attributed her having left home to parental pressure.
The circumstances in which that history was taken are what the Court emphasised. She had already returned and was brought to the hospital by a Lady Constable under official police escort, with her brother present outside; the appellant was nowhere near, having surrendered only on 13 July 2010. Being under police protection and away from the accused, her explicit statement to the doctor disclaiming assault and attributing her departure to parental pressure carried substantial weight. None of it, the Court held, is consistent with a case of kidnapping by force, confinement and rape — and all of it is consistent with the appellant’s plea of false implication.
In evidence she explained the history by saying the appellant had threatened to kill her family, and the trial court accepted that explanation. The High Court could not. She was speaking to a doctor in a hospital under police protection, not in the appellant’s presence. No weapon was shown or recovered. No physical force during the multi-day transit was described. And in cross-examination she conceded that the appellant had worked at her brother’s tailoring shop for fifteen days before the incident, and that during those days he had done nothing suggesting he was a dangerous man.
A threat of that unsupported nature, the Court held, cannot reasonably explain why she categorically denied any assault to an independent medical officer while under police protection, nor her failure to seek help at the railway station, in the train, or in the streets. The explanation had the appearance of an afterthought offered to account for the earlier disclaimers.
The Court applied Ved Pal v. State of Haryana, 2023 SCC OnLine SC 1611, where the Supreme Court — while affirming that a conviction under Section 376 can rest on the sole testimony of the prosecutrix if it is trustworthy, cogent and reliable — gave the benefit of doubt where her evidence was not borne out by the surrounding circumstances and the medical and forensic evidence did not support the prosecution.
Blood that was not there
In her deposition she said that during the alleged assault her clothes were soaked with blood: her clothes were not torn, her arm was twisted, there was no external injury on her person, but her clothes soaked blood.
The MLC, proved by the examining doctor, recorded on local examination a ruptured hymen with an old tear and an introitus easily admitting two fingers. The FSL report of 9 May 2011 detected no blood on any of her garments or swabs — blood being found only on the control samples, the tubes of collected blood and the gauze piece described as a blood sample. No semen was detected on any exhibit, including her undergarments and outer clothes.
The negative report therefore did not merely fail to corroborate her account; it directly disproved the specific and testable assertion she had made about it.
The age question, and what a school register proves
Age mattered because it determines whether consent is relevant at all. The prosecution relied on a school admission entry.
The record held four different figures. Her brother’s complaint gave a date of birth of 1 August 1992. Her own deposition described her as aged approximately eighteen years. Her statement under Section 164 gave seventeen. The MLC recorded seventeen.
The brother was candid in the box: the contents of the complaint were in his handwriting and he had written his sister’s date of birth as 1 August 1992, but at that time he was not sure of it; her date of birth is of the year 1993; she was born in the village; and they have no janampatri for her. Neither parent was examined to prove the date of birth, and no bone age or ossification test was carried out.
Applying State v. Sonu, 2026 SCC OnLine Del 3614, which relied on State v. Tofil Ahmed and State v. Rajiv @ Raju, the Court held that in the absence of any other document establishing date of birth, a mere recording in a school register is not sufficient to establish it conclusively — and where there is doubt, an ossification test ought to have been conducted. That observation assumed particular significance here, where the school entry was unsupported by any document produced at admission, no parent was examined, and the complainant himself gave a different date while admitting he was uncertain of it. On conflicting particulars, the register could not by itself be conclusive proof of age.
Defence suggestions are not admissions
The trial court had treated the suggestions put to witnesses by the defence as an indirect admission of guilt. The High Court held that approach unsustainable.
The appellant had consistently said he was falsely implicated after declining a proposal of marriage from the prosecutrix, following which her brother told him to stop coming to the shop. She herself admitted that she worked alongside him in the same tailoring shop on machines owned by her brother, showing sufficient daily proximity between them.
The Court was careful about what it was and was not holding. It did not find it necessary to hold that the defence had been established, because the burden of proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt lies on the prosecution throughout and does not shift. Citing Raju v. State of M.P., (2008) 15 SCC 133 — that while the testimony of a prosecutrix is evaluated with care, her statement cannot be presumed to be gospel truth without exception, and a court must guard against the possibility of false implication — it held only that the defence was a plausible one finding support in the prosecution’s own record.
Conduct in public places
The last strand was her movement during the episode. She travelled by auto-rickshaw through public roads, waited on an open railway platform, and travelled in a passenger train, without raising an alarm or seeking assistance, despite ample opportunity and the presence of railway police and fellow passengers. The Court held this pointed towards her voluntarily accompanying the appellant rather than being taken, enticed or forcibly abducted.
The Court also recorded a separate contradiction in her account of the manner of the return journey, and drew on a line of Delhi High Court decisions — State Govt. of NCT of Delhi v. Ajay Kumar Yadav, Raju v. State and Atiqur Rehman v. Govt. of NCT of Delhi — as applying with considerable force to the facts.
The conclusion
Taken cumulatively, the Court held the testimony inherently improbable and untrustworthy. The infirmities — the earliest MLC history denying assault and attributing her departure to parental pressure, recorded under police escort in the accused’s absence; the negative FSL report directly disproving her assertion of being soaked in blood; the unverified school entry beset with conflicting age particulars; and the contradictions on the manner of the alleged abduction — were held to be neither trivial nor ordinary variations attributable to trauma or the passage of time. They struck at the root of the prosecution case and created reasonable doubt, and the trial court had fallen into grave error in brushing them aside.
The appeal was allowed, the judgment of conviction of 19 July 2013 and the order on sentence of 24 July 2013 were set aside, and the appellant was acquitted of all the charges. He is on bail pursuant to orders of the High Court.
The judgment does not lower the standard by which a prosecutrix’s evidence is assessed, and it repeats the settled rule that her sole testimony can sustain a conviction. What it insists on is that where the prosecution’s own documents — the MLC taken first, the forensic report, the school record — contradict the account on facts capable of objective test, a court cannot treat those contradictions as noise. Here there were three of them, and the appellant waited thirteen years for a court to say so.