After nearly a decade behind bars, eleven individuals convicted of murder walked free this week, not due to new evidence or a dramatic revelation, but because the system never asked a ten-year-old the most basic question: Do you understand what an oath means?
The Supreme Court tore apart the foundation of the conviction, spotlighting a gaping hole in the trial process. At the heart of the case was the testimony of a young girl—ten years old at the time—whose credibility was never properly examined before her statements were used to convict. The justices noted, in no uncertain terms, that this breached a non-negotiable legal safeguard.
“The law isn’t unclear. You don’t just put a child on the stand and hope for the best,” the bench noted. “A judge must first determine whether the child comprehends what’s being asked—and more importantly—what it means to swear an oath.”
But that never happened.
Instead, the child was sworn in by a magistrate who skipped the vital step of assessing her understanding. No questions. No test. No indication that she knew what an oath even was. Yet her words helped send eleven people to prison for murder.
Justice Abhay S Oka, writing for the bench alongside Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, pulled no punches. The failure to question the child before she testified, the lack of a Test Identification Parade (TIP), and admissions during cross-examination that her mother might have influenced her account all pointed to one glaring truth: the witness’s testimony was compromised, possibly coached—and certainly unqualified to carry the weight of a murder conviction.
“Minors are particularly vulnerable to external influence,” the court warned. “In this case, the trial court failed to safeguard the fairness of the process by not adhering to the mandatory preliminary inquiry.”
The court discarded the child’s testimony in its entirety, citing the fundamental legal misstep. Without it, the prosecution’s case crumbled. The eleven convicted individuals, whose lives had been rerouted by a flawed process, were acquitted.
Nine years of liberty lost—all because one essential question went unasked.
