The Madras High Court has acquitted a death row convict from the charge of aggravated sexual assault under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012 and modified his capital punishment to life imprisonment only for the charge of murdering a nine-year-old girl child.

Justices Anita Sumanth and Sunder Mohan passed the verdict while partly allowing an appeal preferred by the convict Kakka alias Karunas in the 2024 Puducherry POCSO Act case, in which the second accused Harikrishnan alias Vivekanandan had died by suicide, inside the prison, before commencement of trial.

A special court for POCSO Act cases had, on April 30, 2026, convicted the appellant and sentenced him to death both for the charge under Section 6 of the POCSO Act and Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code. However, the High Court confirmed his conviction only for murder and modified the punishment to life sentence.

The Division Bench arrived at the decision after examination and cross examination of some of the witnesses during the course of hearing of the appeal, along with a reference made by the trial court for confirmation of death sentences imposed by it for the POCSO charge and the murder charge.

The judges had appointed senior counsel N.R. Elango, assisted by A. Nagarajan and B. Arvind Srevatsa, to argue for the appellant apart from the appointment of legal aid counsel S. Sridevi since the convict had told the court he did not have the wherewithal to engage a lawyer on his own.

Authoring the verdict, Justice Mohan pointed out that the entire prosecution case was based upon circumstantial evidence as there was no eye-witness to the crime. Hence, the prosecution had to prove a chain of circumstances, without any break in the link, in order to establish the guilt of the accused.

According to the prosecution, the two accused had subjected the girl child, their neighbour, to aggravated sexual assault at the residence of the second accused before smothering her to death and dumping her body in a canal behind the place of occurrence on March 2, 2024.

The body was recovered from the canal on March 5, 2024 and the Puducherry Director General of Police had appointed a woman police officer in the rank of Superintendent of Police on March 6, 2024 to investigate the case considering the gravity of the offence.

The Division Bench held that the prosecution had, through medical evidence, conclusively established the fact of the victim child having been subjected to aggravated sexual assault and done to death. However, it did not go into the case against the second accused since he had died on September 16, 2024 and the charges against him stood abated even before commencement of trial.

In so far as the appellant was concerned, the judges said, neither his semen nor blood stain was found in any of the objects that were recovered from the scene of crime. They refused to give credence to the forensic analyst’s opinion that there was a “close match” between his touch/trace DNA reportedly lifted from the scene of crime and his blood sample.

They highlighted that the analyst had not forwarded to the trial court an allele comparison chart between the touch/trace DNA of the appellant supposedly recovered from a dhoti belonging to the second accused and the appellant’s blood sample. When asked for the reason, he told the judges that the chart did not satisfy the minimum cutoff/threshold value.

Answering further queries posed by the High Court judges during his cross examination as part of the hearing on the reference and the appeal, he said, there were no gradations such as close or very close matches while comparing the allele (genes). Forensic analysts were required to report only match, no match or no opinion.

Further, it was only in the High Court that for the first time, it had been revealed that what was compared with the blood sample of the convict was only a touch/trace DNA and not semen or blood stain. The semen of the appellant had not been found even in the vaginal swab of the child victim.

The Division Bench, however, agreed with Additional Solicitor General AR.L. Sundaresan that the prosecution had succeeded in proving the ‘last seen’ theory through the evidence of a local resident, Alphonse, who had seen the victim child along with the appellant just hours before she was reported missing from her residence.

Though the witness had taken three days to inform this to the police, who, in turn, took three more days to record his statement on March 8, 2024, the judges said that such a lapse in the investigation would not by itself render the evidence of the witness untruthful.

The judges also said that the police had established that the appellant was at the place of occurrence since his hair strands had been recovered from a pillow at the second accused’s residence. Further, a coir rope recovered from the residence matched with the coir rope with which the child’s body had been tied.

Further, the appellant’s friend, Jawahar had told the police that he had gone to Chennai along with the appellant on March 3, 2024, and returned to Puducherry on March 4, 2024. During their visit, the appellant was perturbed and nervous and had asked whether a body dumped in a canal would float or sink.

Referring to a few other circumstances too, the judges concluded that the appellant was certainly guilty of murdering the child and screening the evidence. However, “it is not established by the prosecution by any acceptable evidence that the accused had committed penetrative sexual assault on the victim,” they said.

“Though we are convinced based on the circumstances that the petitioner is guilty of the offence under Section 302 of the IPC, our perception and inference cannot be said to be infallible,” the judges observed, called for a report from the probation officer on the conduct of the appellant, and modified the death sentence to life imprisonment.

(Assistance for overcoming suicidal thoughts is available on the Tele-MANAS 14416 and Sneha’s suicide prevention helpline 044-24640050.)