The top court had on December 8 last year treated the verdict as ‘perverse’, castigated the high court, and described it as ‘highly objectionable and completely unwarranted’, some observations.
New Delhi:
The Supreme Court today quashed a Calcutta High Court judgment to discharge an accused in a sexual assault case while making unacceptable commentaries for teenage girls to’stop provoking’ the sexual urge, directing the lower court to punish the accused who summoned him and made such observations’shocking’ and perverse.
Allowing the accused to shift the burden on the prosecution and restore the conviction of the accused for rape and sexual assault under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, a bench of Justices Abhay S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan said the sentence of the man will, however, depend on the report of the expert committee, which the West Bengal government has to form to interact with the victim, who is now married with the
The bench went on to deprecate highly the high court’s verdict, saying that while a judge has to decide a case, he or she cannot preach and one cannot write his or her own opinion while delivering the judgment.
The high court was particularly merciless when it said that the criminalization of a romantic relationship between two young people of the opposite sex should be left to the better judgment of the judicial system. The courts are bound by and required to enforce the law. The courts cannot perpetrate violence against the law, the bench said.
Noting that obscurity is the enemy of a good judgment, it stated that a verdict has to be in plain language inter alia and that it has to be remembered that an order is not an essay or a novel.
