New Delhi: Delhi High Court has upheld the conviction of a man accused of sodomising an 11-year-old homeless boy, asserting that a child surviving on the street cannot be expected to give precise details about date, time or clothing with the same accuracy as a witness living in a settled environment.Dismissing the appeal of the accused, Justice Chandrasekharan Sudha didn’t tinker with the trial court’s conviction in Aug 2025 under Section 377 (unnatural offences) IPC and Section 6 (punishment for aggravated penetrative sexual assault) of the Pocso Act.The high court modified the trial court’s 20-year jail term to 10 years on the grounds that at the time of the crime, the sentence was a 10-year term. Section 6 of the Pocso Act became punishable with a minimum term of 20 years from Aug 16, 2019.The boy alleged that in Nov 2016, the accused sexually assaulted him while he was sleeping under a railway bridge at Kashmere Gate. The incident was reported on the police helpline by some social workers who had come to know about the violation from the boy.The counsel of the accused claimed his client had been falsely implicated. He argued that the prosecution failed to prove the boy was under 12 years old and said there were several inconsistencies in his testimony.The high court, however, pointed out that throughout all the versions testified to by the boy, the identity of the accused, the place of the crime, the nature of the sexual assault and the sequence of events immediately after the incident remained substantially unchanged. “Minor discrepancies, omissions or improvements, which do not go to the root of the prosecution case, are natural consequences of normal errors of observation and memory, particularly when a child witness recounts a traumatic incident after a lapse of time,” the court said. The survivor was a homeless child, engaged in rag-picking, and cannot be expected to give precise particulars regarding dates, time or clothing, it added.It said although in his testimony, the survivor claimed that he was about 15 years of age, given his social background, it was “unrealistic” to expect him to know his exact age. His school record showed his date of birth as Oct 12, 2005, making him 11 years old in 2016, the court said.
