Tamil Nadu: Semen becomes ‘soil’, rape accused almost off hook

CHENNAI: A typographical error of ‘semen’ being recorded as ‘semman’ (which means red sand in Tamil) almost allowed a rape accused to go scot-free, before the Madras high court stepped in and reversed his acquittal by a lower court.
Instead of mentioning that a two-and-a-half-year-old girl’s genitals had traces of ‘semen’, the chargesheet mentioned it as ‘semman’ — meaning red soil in the genitals. Citing the ‘dirt’ that might have got stuck as the child might have been playing around, the Tiruvarur district Mahila court freed the offender from the case.
Justice P Velmurugan of the Madras HC, however, sentenced S Prakash of Tiruvarur district to five-year jail term and directed the government to pay Rs 1 lakh compensation to the girl. In September 2017, Prakash raped the child when her mother stepped out to buy food. On her return, the mother found the child crying and noticed a white liquid on her private parts. She admitted the child to a hospital and lodged a complaint. The prosecution told the HC that while recording evidence before the trial court, the word ‘semen’ in English was typed as ‘semman’ in Tamil. Taking advantage of the mistake committed by a typist during trial, the defence had argued that what the mother found on her child was ‘red colour soil’ (semman) and that no semen was found in the child’s undergarments.
Justice Velmurugan said the investigating officer should have made more effort, and added: “Culprits are escaping due to technical reasons and, unfortunately, investigation wing is also not up to the standard. The trial court also, at times, are not applying their minds and exercising their discretionary power either to direct for reinvestigation or searching for proof beyond reasonable doubt, giving benefit of doubt to the accused. But cases like this, we cannot give much importance to the technical ground of proof.”
As for the two-year delay in lodging the complaint, Justice Velmurugan said that in cases like these, where the victim is a child who cannot communicate immediately and the mother, an illiterate, delay in filing FIR should not be fatal to the case of the prosecution. “No mother of a victim, especially an illiterate woman in rural areas, would immediately go to police in such cases and the prosecution and court failed in their duties when they stressed on technicalities like delay in the complaint,” Justice Velmurugan observed.
Pointing out that the police complaint clearly showed that the woman had meant white colour fluid while narrating the complaint and that it was the typist who wrote the English word ‘semen’ as ‘semman’ in ‘Tamil, the judge said, “admittedly, the defence side has taken flimsy defence that the mother stated as “semman colour.”