A man has been held guilty of assaulting a woman and snatching her gold chain by a court here which relied on the victim's testimony.
"The court while appreciating the evidence must not attach undue importance to minor discrepancies. The discrepancies which do not shake the basic version of the prosecution case may be discarded.
"The discrepancies which are due to normal errors of perception or observation should not be given importance. The errors due to lapse of memory may be given due allowance," Metropolitan Magistrate Purva Sareen said.
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The court, which is yet to pronounce the quantum of sentence, also said, "Minor contradictions in the statement of witnesses are not fatal to the prosecution as long as the main ingredients, that it the identity of the accused and the offence committed have been duly proved."
It made the observations while rejecting the contention of the convict that there were no independent witnesses.
"Counsel for the accused has pointed out material contradictions in statements of the witnesses like absence of public witnesses and place of preparation of documents...
"...But prosecution story is absolutely consistent regarding the time of incident, regarding statement of complainant and subsequent registration of FIR," the court said.
According to the prosecution, the complaint lodged by victim Yamini Gupta alleged that on the evening of October 14, 2013, Rajesh assaulted her and ran away after snatching her gold chain in Safdarjung Enclave here.
Rajesh was arrested two months later by the police with the help of a informer, it said.
The court, while convicting him of the offences under sections 356 (using criminal force in attempting to commit theft) and 379 (theft) of the IPC, said that the complainant's testimony had "efficacy and relevancy" and there was no reason fr her to omit real culprit and falsely implicate the accused.
"It is a well settled law that once the eye version is given particularly by the complainant herself, the court will normally rely upon such version of prosecution unless it suffers from serious infirmities or improvements," it said.
