“The emotional and physical circumstances of [a] lady who has seen such an unkind act with her own eyes in the injured condition surrounding pool of blood in such an occurrence cannot be equated with those attending an ordinary criminal incident,” the court said.Criminal trials are not decided by counting discrepancies, a court in Jammu and Kashmir’s Ramban said as it sentenced a militant to two life terms for the 2005 killing of a family.Mohammad Sharief and another militant, Shabir Ahmed, were accused of entering the house of Rashid Bohra on the evening of July 27, 2005, and firing indiscriminately, killing three members of his family, including his five-month-old grandson. Rashid and his daughter-in-law survived the attack but were seriously injured.Sharief was arrested in 2019, while Ahmed, who was never arrested, died in 2006.The Ramban court sentenced Sharief to two life terms — one for murder and another for criminal conspiracy to commit an offence against the state. He was also sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for 10 years for attempted murder and another 10 years under the Arms Act. All sentences will run concurrently, Ramban Principal Sessions Judge Ajay Kumar Gupta said.Rejecting the defence plea seeking the accused’s acquittal on grounds of discrepancies in prosecution evidence, the judge said: “Human testimony is not expected to reproduce an event with photographic precision. Depending upon their nature, only contradictions relating to the core of the occurrence, identity of the assailant and those affecting the presence of witness may ordinarily have substantial bearing upon credibility. Minor discrepancies regarding sequence, exact position, words spoken, or peripheral details may naturally arise with passage of time”.Rejecting the defence plea that there had been a delay of one to four months in recording the statements of two eyewitnesses, the judge observed: “In criminal trials, particularly those involving brutal and indiscriminate violence, the defence routinely attempts to weaponise the delay in recording statements under Section 161 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) to cast doubt on the prosecution’s narrative. However, the law does not operate in a vacuum of hyper-technicalities. When the delay is a direct consequence of extreme medical trauma, prolonged unconsciousness, and the agonising fight for survival by the victims, such delay is not only fully justified but naturally expected”.The court said the delay in recording the statements of the injured eyewitnesses, Abdul Rashid and his daughter-in-law Mashooma Begum, was unequivocally explained by the voluminous medical and factual record. Rashid was hit “six times by AK-47 bullets”, rendering him entirely incapacitated and unable to talk when neighbours arrived and took him to Jammu for life-saving treatment. He remained unconscious for seven days, the court said.Story continues below this ad“Mashooma suffered an even more catastrophic physical assault, being hit about 15-16 times,” the judge observed, pointing out that she was rendered unconscious on the spot. She was taken to Jammu for treatment and regained consciousness only after a week, the court said.Section 161 CrPC requires a witness to possess the physical capacity and mental faculty to narrate complex and traumatic events, the court said.“The prosecution case is consequently not one where an able-bodied witness calmly remained in his village for one month, consciously withheld the names of the accused and thereafter suddenly introduced their names,” the judge observed. “It is equally impermissible to take note that a person who suffered a serious firearm injury in a militant attack, lost his wife, daughter and a small six-month-old grandson before his eyes in such a barbaric act and was shifted to hospital having critical injuries must necessarily have been physically and mentally incapable of giving a detailed police statement immediately.”Pointing out that Mashooma Begum’s statement required even more careful consideration, the court noted that “she had lost her sister-in-law, mother-in-law and above all her minor child before her own eyes in such a barbaric act of militant attack”.Story continues below this ad“The emotional and physical circumstances of [a] lady who has seen such an unkind act with her own eyes in the injured condition surrounding pool of blood in such an occurrence cannot be equated with those attending an ordinary criminal incident,” the court said.