A court here has acquitted a doctor accused of repeatedly raping an employee in his nursing home on the ground that the testimony of the alleged victim was not convincing.
Though the woman claimed that she was raped after being administered intoxicants, medical examination did not reveal presence of semen samples and the chemical examination could not detect alkaloids, barbiturates and tranquillizers in the gastric lavage of the prosecutrix. “Therefore, I hold that neither the medical evidence nor the forensic evidence is compatible to the case put forth by the prosecution,” said Additional Sessions Judge Kamini Lau.
The court also took note of an allegation of rape that the victim had earlier made against another person who had promised to marry but later cheated her. That case was settled out of court and the accused was acquitted.
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Ms. Lau said: “The prosecutrix ‘V’ is an educated worldly-wise lady, living in a metropolitan city, aware of her rights, who had filed a similar complaint against another man, Monu. Why then after the first incident of rape she did not report this matter to the police or did not disclose this fact to anybody? It is impossible that a mature girl who had previously undergone the same trauma (there being another complaint against one Monu on similar grounds) would not be aware of her statutory rights and in case anything of this kind would have happened she would not have immediately resisted and reported the matter to the police. It is this long silence of the prosecutrix which is highly damaging for her and indicative of the fact that either there was no such incident or it was a consensual affair between two mature adults. There could be no other explanation forthcoming for this long delay by the prosecutrix of one-two months in reporting this matter which she did not highlight previously despite opportunity.”