Dying declarations of Dec 16 victim not inconsistent: Court

There was no inconsistency in the three dying declarations of the December 16 gangrape victim, the Delhi High Court today said while sending four convicts in the case to the gallows.
The court said the convicts failed to bring anything on record to prove that the victim was tutored to inculpate them.
"In the present case, we do not find any such inconsistency in the three dying declarations of the deceased as to render them unworthy of credence," a bench of justices Reva Khetrapal and Pratibha Rani said.
"There is nothing forthcoming on record to suggest that the prosecutrix was tutored as is sought to be made out. It is even otherwise hard to believe that the near and dear ones of the prosecutrix and the police officials had tutored her so that the accused persons could be inculpated and the real culprits let loose," the court said.

It said that the law on multiple dying declarations has been elaborately dwelt upon by the Supreme Court in a large number of cases and it has been consistently held that it is not required for multiple dying declarations to be identical with each other to pass the test of admissibility.
The first dying declaration was made by the victim before the treating doctor Rashmi Ahuja, the second one before Sub-Divisional Magistrate Usha Chaturvedi and the third before Metropolitan Magistrate Pawan Kumar.
After going through all the three statements, the high court came to the conclusion there is no such inconsistency in the statements to discard them.

"As discussed above, all the three aforesaid statements made by the prosecutrix are in line with each other and there is no such inconsistency in the said statements as would enable us to discard one or the other of the statements," it said.