Convicted on a confession and nothing else, a mother is acquitted. Gauhati High Court adds that postpartum psychosis should have been considered

Justices Michael Zothankhuma and Rajesh Mazumdar set aside a life sentence where every witness spoke only of what the police had told them, and order immediate release.

A baby girl, one month and eight days old, went missing from a house in Sivasagar on a night in October 2016. Her mother was convicted of murdering her and of causing the disappearance of evidence, and sentenced to life imprisonment. The conviction rested on a confessional statement. The Gauhati High Court has set it aside, because the rest of the prosecution's evidence consisted of relatives and villagers repeating what the police had told them — and has added an observation about an illness the trial court never considered.

What the witnesses actually said

The appeal was under Section 374(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure against a judgment of the Sessions Judge, Sivasagar, convicting the appellant under Sections 302 and 201 of the Penal Code. She was sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for life with a fine on the murder count, and three years with a fine for causing disappearance of evidence, the sentences to run concurrently. Eleven prosecution witnesses were examined, and the trial court convicted on the basis of her confessional statement recorded under Section 164.

The first witness was her husband, who had reported the child missing. His evidence was that the child was found missing and that when he asked his wife she said she did not know where she was. The prosecution declared him hostile. In cross-examination he denied having told the investigating officer that his wife had confessed to the villagers that she had thrown the child into the Dikhow river, and said she was arrested on suspicion of having killed the child.

The second and third witnesses were her father-in-law and brother-in-law. Their evidence was that the police told them that on being interrogated the appellant had confessed to killing the child by throwing her into the Dikhow river.

Three further witnesses gave evidence to the same effect: that the police informed them and the other villagers that the appellant had killed the child by throwing her into the river. Another said only that he had gone to the house and learnt the child was missing.

Set out together, as the judgment sets them out, the shape of the case becomes plain. Not one witness deposed to seeing anything, or to hearing the appellant say anything to them. What the prosecution had was an account the police had given to the village, repeated back from the witness box — which is hearsay, and proves only that the police said it.

The confession, and what was left without it

That left the confessional statement as the entire foundation of the conviction, and the Court held it inadmissible in evidence.

The consequence follows immediately. A conviction resting only on a confession that cannot be received, with no independent evidence of the offence, cannot stand. The Court held the conviction under Sections 302 and 201 unsustainable, and that the prosecution had failed to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

It is worth noting what the record did not contain. The child's body is not spoken of in the evidence summarised in the judgment; there is no recovery, no medical evidence of the death, and no witness to the act. The case against the mother began and ended with what she was said to have told the police.

The illness nobody raised

Having decided the appeal, the Bench went further, and this is the part of the judgment likely to be cited.

It said that even assuming the confessional statement could be relied on, it was perplexed as to why the appellant would have killed her child. Her statement was that she was mentally unwell and that she had not liked her daughter from the day she was born. Trying to understand a case in which a mother does not like her newborn child, the Court said, it had come across rare cases of infanticide due to postpartum psychosis.

The judgment then sets out what that condition is. Postpartum psychosis is a severe mental illness developing acutely in the early postnatal period. It is a psychiatric emergency in which a woman can lose touch with reality; symptoms can come and go, be fleeting and changeable. Risk to babies arises in around 35 per cent of cases, through mothers acting on false beliefs, handling their babies incorrectly, being severely confused or behaving in very unusual ways — behaviour that is temporary and caused by the illness's effect on the brain. Citing the National Library of Medicine, the Court recorded that it is rare, affecting one to two women per thousand, but can develop rapidly and endanger the life of mother and child.

The Bench was careful about the status of the discussion. It said it was not required to go into whether the appellant suffered from the condition — but that it should have been considered by the trial court before convicting her.

That is a pointed observation about how such cases are tried. Where the only explanation offered for an otherwise inexplicable act is that the accused was mentally unwell, and where she had given birth five weeks earlier, a court sentencing her to life imprisonment has been asked, in substance, to find an intention that the medical literature says the illness can displace. The appellant's own statement raised it. Nobody tested it.

Order

The appeal succeeded. The appellant was acquitted of the charges under Sections 302 and 201, the judgment of the Sessions Judge was set aside, and she was directed to be released immediately from judicial custody if not wanted in any other case. The trial court records were ordered to be sent back.

The evidentiary holding is orthodox and would decide the case on its own: a confession that cannot be received into evidence cannot convict, and witnesses who repeat what the police told them add nothing. What gives the judgment its weight is that the Bench did not stop at the acquittal it had already reached.

Infanticide prosecutions against mothers in the weeks after childbirth are not common, but they recur, and they usually turn on a confession and a village's account of what the police found. This judgment puts on record, in a reported decision, that there is a recognised psychiatric condition which can produce exactly the behaviour such cases describe, and that a trial court faced with an unexplained act by a recently delivered mother who says she was unwell should consider it before it convicts. That is guidance a sessions court can act on without needing the defence to raise it first.