A father who was sentenced to life imprisonment after being set up by his wife for defiling step-daughter has been set free by the High Court.
According to the Star, the man was sentenced in 2018 after he was found guilty of defiling his 9-year-old stepdaughter.
In a ruling on April 23, 2020, Justice Mumbua Matheka ruled that the pieces of evidence tabled by accounts of witnesses were unsupportive thus no proof of penetration.
Further, Justice Matheka pointed out that the magistrate in charge of the trial failed to comply to the Evidence act.
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“The role of the police is to receive the reports and investigate every possible angle to tie up the loose ends and leave no gaps. The prosecution ought not to present any case to court with loose ends or obvious gaps such as this. Sexual offenses are not mathematical equations,” said the judge.
Additionally, according to the ruling judge, the prosecution painted the stepfather as abusive without presenting any concrete evidence. For instance, it had accounted that the accused had defiled the child three times.
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“Overall, the corpus of evidence before the trial magistrate was contradictory, inconsistent and not worthy to warrant a conviction. the appeal succeeds, the conviction is quashed. The appellant is to be set at liberty unless otherwise legally held,” added the judge.
The details of the incident as accounted by the stepdaughter indicated that she was washing dishes while her siblings had gone to the river before the accused engaged in the act.
Also, apparently the accused had asked the stepdaughter to keep mum on the issued and promised to buy her new clothes.
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