The judgment emphasizes the importance of due weight to the opinion of the judge and the jury, and the limitations on the examination of an arrested person's body and the admissibility of evidence obtained through such examinations.

JUDGMENT

Lort-Williams, J. - The accused in this case was charged with rape upon a girl, nine years old. He himself is stated to be about fifteen though there is no definite evidence upon the point. He was tried by the Additional Sessions Judge, Hooghly, at Howrah and a jury who brought in an unanimous verdict of acquittal saying that they gave him the benefit of the doubt.

2. The prosecution case is that the girl Panchu Bala Dasi was the wife of Rajani Khanra, who was about eighteen years old and that she had been married to him four years before at the age of five. They had never lived together as man and wife. The girl lived with her father and mother and the husband and wife used to visit each other in their parent's houses from time to time. At the time when this crime was alleged to have been committed the husband was away from his home and the father and mother of the girl also were away temporarily leaving her alone in the house.

3. She says that the accused Bhondar came up and asked her for some water, then caught her by the hand, dragged her into the cowshed, laid her down on the mud floor, and ravished her after stripping her naked. She cried and the witness Benode Mandal came and according to his evidence, he saw the accused get up from the body of the girl leaving her on the ground. The accused tried to escape but Benode Mandal caught him: he begged for mercy but Benode took him to another part of the village to the girl's mother.

4. Another witness, Benode Shaha, says that he saw the accused being taken along the main road by Benode Mandal, and that he saw the girl standing by the ghat near at hand and blood was trickling from her on to the ground. There is evidence that the girl's cloth was saturated with blood and there is other evidence given by the girl's mother that when she saw the girl for the first time, blood was dripping down her legs on to the ground. Evidence was given by the medical officer to show that the injuries he found on the body of the girl were consistent with her having been raped.

5. Also he was allowed to give evidence that he had examined the boy (the accused), and that he found injuries on both his shoulder blades. Also there was an abrasion upon the frenum of his penis, which he said was consistent with an injury sustained when penetrating with difficulty the vagina of a girl.

6. The defence set up by the accused was that he had been falsely implicated, that the rape had been committed by the husband, that this had been discovered by Benode Mandal and others and that they had taken advantage of this knowledge to force the husband and this child and her mother to join them in concocting this story against the accused, in pursuance of a settled plan to drive the accused's family from the village, and obtain their lands, that in pursuance of this plan they had caught hold of the accused and had inflicted the injuries upon him which were discovered by the doctor and had put blood upon his cloth in order to strengthen the case against him.

7. The learned Judge disagreed with the verdict of the jury and has referred the case to this Court because he considered the verdict to be perverse and contrary to the weight of the evidence. He relied considerably upon the medical evidence and upon the fact that the accused's penis was injured. Also he thinks that the story that the accused was deliberately injured for the purpose of proving this concocted case is absurd.

8. I must confess that at first sight this looked to me to be a very clear case, and but for the arguments of the learned advocate for the accused I should have been inclined to accept the Judge's reference.

9. The learned advocate has pointed out a number of matters in evidence, not of very great importance but each one sufficient to cause any reasonable jury to pause and to consider before accepting the story of the prosecution.

10. There are one or two incidents in the case which also may have influenced the jury. The first one is that the pl