The POCSO Act reverses the usual burden: once the prosecution proves the foundational facts, the accused is presumed guilty and must rebut it. But that presumption, the Supreme Court held, does not free the prosecution from first laying that foundation, and does not displace the standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt once the accused meets it with cogent contrary evidence. Here the medical and forensic evidence, on the Court’s reading, positively ruled out the assault alleged, and the two examining doctors contradicted each other. On that record the conviction could not stand.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court has set aside the conviction and ten-year sentence of a man found guilty under Section 6 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, holding that the statutory presumption of guilt under Sections 29 and 30 of the Act does not relieve the prosecution of the obligation to prove the foundational facts of its case, and that on the evidence the prosecution had failed to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt [Deepak v. State Govt. of NCT Delhi].
A Bench of Justice Prashant Kumar Mishra and Justice N.V. Anjaria, in a judgment authored by Justice Anjaria, allowed the appeal and acquitted the appellant, directing his release.
The background
The prosecution arose from a complaint of December 2015 in Delhi, in which it was alleged that the appellant had sexually assaulted a very young child. A trial court, sitting as a designated Special Court under the POCSO Act, convicted the appellant in 2023 under Section 6 of the POCSO Act and Section 363 of the IPC, sentencing him to ten years’ rigorous imprisonment on the POCSO count, while acquitting him of the offence under Section 506 IPC. The Delhi High Court dismissed his appeal and confirmed the conviction in July 2025, bringing the matter to the Supreme Court.
Out of deference to the child at the centre of the case, this report omits the identifying and factual particulars, as the law requires, and confines itself to the legal question the Court decided.
The medical and forensic evidence
The Court’s decision turned on the medical and forensic record, which it found not merely uncorroborative but affirmatively inconsistent with the prosecution case.
The first doctor consulted, a private practitioner, had spoken of a reddishness, but the Court found his testimony unreliable, both internally discrepant and contradicted by the other evidence. The doctor who conducted the formal medical examination found no injury and no abnormality of the kind the allegation would entail. The forensic examination compounded the difficulty for the prosecution: the samples sent to the laboratory yielded no semen and no male DNA, and the expert clarified that the blood said to have been seen could not be detected. In other words, the Court held, the contemporaneous accounts of what had been observed were not borne out by the scientific examination.
The Court acknowledged the settled proposition, urged by the prosecution, that the absence of injury or of semen does not by itself disprove an assault. But it distinguished the present case on the footing that here the medical evidence, read with the forensic report, did not merely fail to support the allegation but positively ruled out the act alleged, and that the two doctors’ accounts could not be reconciled with each other.
The POCSO presumption, and its limits
The heart of the judgment is its treatment of the reverse burden the POCSO Act creates. Under Sections 29 and 30, once certain foundational facts are established, the Special Court is to presume that the accused committed the offence and that he had the requisite mental state, and it is for the accused to rebut that presumption.
The Court held that this presumption is not absolute and does not relieve the prosecution of its primary duty. A court, it observed, should not be so overshadowed by the presumption as to abandon the usual principles of appreciating evidence; the accused must be given full room to displace the presumption and demolish the prosecution case, and where he does so, the benefit must follow. On the record, the Court held, the appellant had succeeded in rebutting the prosecution story: even if the presumption initially operated, the prosecution evidence itself manifested inconsistencies, improbabilities and material contradictions, the medical evidence was non-corroborative in all respects, and the defence version was cogent enough to crumble the prosecution case.
In that light, the Court concluded that it could hardly be said that the prosecution had proved the appellant’s guilt, much less beyond reasonable doubt. It set aside the conviction and sentence, held the appellant not guilty, and directed his release unless his custody was required in any other matter.
Why it matters
Offences against children are among the gravest the criminal law addresses, and the POCSO Act’s reverse burden reflects a deliberate legislative choice to make them easier to prosecute, recognising how hard such cases are to prove and how vulnerable the witnesses are. This judgment does not dilute that choice. What it clarifies is the boundary the presumption operates within: it shifts the burden once the prosecution has laid a foundation, but it does not permit a conviction to rest on the presumption alone where the prosecution’s own evidence is internally contradictory and the medical and forensic record affirmatively negates the allegation.
The distinction the Court was careful to preserve is an important one. It reaffirmed, rather than doubted, the principle that the mere absence of injury or of forensic traces does not disprove an assault, because such absence is common and explicable. This case was decided not on absence but on positive contradiction: findings that, on the Court’s reading, were incompatible with the act having occurred, and two medical witnesses who could not be reconciled. That is a materially different situation from a case resting on a credible account unsupported by physical corroboration, and the judgment should not be read as weakening those.
An acquittal in a case of this nature is painful whichever way the truth lies, and the judgment carries no suggestion about what did or did not happen beyond its finding on the evidence led. What the Court has held is that this prosecution, on this record, did not meet the standard the criminal law requires even under a statute that eases the path to conviction, and that the presumption of guilt cannot substitute for proof where the proof itself points the other way. The presumption of innocence, the Court’s reasoning reflects, survives even the POCSO Act’s reverse burden once the accused has genuinely met it.
Case Title: Deepak v. State Govt. of NCT Delhi [Criminal Appeals arising out of SLP (Crl.) Nos. 21271-72 of 2025]
Bench: Justice Prashant Kumar Mishra and Justice N.V. Anjaria, Supreme Court of India
Date of Judgment: September 17, 2026 | Neutral Citation: 2026 INSC 1008
Status: Appeals allowed. Conviction and sentence under Section 6 POCSO Act and Section 363 IPC set aside; appellant acquitted and directed to be released.
This report concerns an offence against a child. If you or someone you know needs support or wishes to report such an offence, the national child helpline CHILDLINE can be reached at 1098, round the clock.