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NEW DELHI: Supreme Court Friday ruled that a dying declaration cannot be rejected because of a time lag between a victim giving statement and subsequent death. It said such declaration need not necessarily be made under the shadow of death to be valid.A bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and N K Singh also said a dying declaration need not necessarily be recorded in the presence of a magistrate, and that the lack of a doctor’s certification as to the fitness of the declarant’s state of mind would not ipso facto render the dying declaration unacceptable. It quashed the Allahabad HC order which held that dying declarations could not be accepted as the victim did not die immediately after the statement and there was a gap of almost two months.“In our considered view, HC erred in holding that these statements cannot be treated as dying declaration(s) merely because the death of the deceased occurred after a substantial lapse of time from their recordings. Such an approach is clearly untenable since the law does not require that a declarant, at the time of making the statement, to be under the shadow of death or the expectation that death is imminent,” the bench said. It said, “Here the time gap between the incident and the death is less than two months. In any event, Section 32 of the Evidence Act contains no such limitation. What is pertinent is that the statement relates either to the cause of death or circumstances leading to it.”Challenging the validity of the dying declaration of a woman, who was allegedly shot by her husband for not giving birth to a boy, the accused said such statements cannot be relied upon as they were neither recorded in the presence of a magistrate nor was there any medical certification regarding the mental fitness of the deceased to give such statements. But the bench refused to accept it.“We find these contentions bereft of any merit. We say so because it is a well-established position of law that a statement made by a deceased person, as to the cause of his death or to the circumstances of the transaction which resulted in his death, to a police officer and recorded under Section 161 of CrPC, shall be relevant and admissible under Section 32(1) of the Evidence Act, notwithstanding the express bar provided in Section 162 CrPC,” the bench said. “Such a statement, upon the death of the declarant, assumes the character of a dying declaration. It is also equally settled that a dying declaration need not necessarily be recorded in the presence of a magistrate, and that the lack of a doctor’s certification as to the fitness of the declarant’s state of mind would not ipso facto render the dying declaration unacceptable.”The court allowed the appeal filed by the woman’s parents to prosecute her in-laws for harassing her and provoking her husband to kill her as she had given birth to three girls and she was allegedly pregnant with a fourth baby. The court relied upon the dying declaration of the woman, and statement of her nine-year-old daughter to initiate proceedings against her in-laws in addition to her husband.“We find the material on record, i.e., the depositions of PW-1 (brother of deceased) and PW-2 (daughter), along with the statements of the deceased recorded during the investigation, prima facie suggests the complicity of the respondents in the commission of the offence. There, thus, exists sufficient ground to exercise the power under Section 319 of CrPC and summon them to face trial,” it said.“The objections raised by the respondents, including the alleged tutoring of the minor witness, omission of their names in the FIR, inconsistencies in the statements of the deceased, and lack of contemporaneous medical certification, are all premature and cannot be conclusively decided at the stage of exercising power under Section 319 of CrPC (empowers trial court to summon and add persons as accused),” the bench said.
