The Supreme Court issued the ruling while clearing Kerala resident Santosh Kumar N P of rape and cheating charges after the Kerala High Court had rejected his discharge petitions. The complainant had alleged that he concealed a prior marriage to deceitfully cohabit with her from 1996 to 2003. Justices warned that criminalizing broken consensual partnerships dilutes the gravity of actual sexual violence and coercion. Consequently, the court held that criminal statutes must not be weaponized against partners simply because an alliance has deteriorated.
Key points
Intimacy during a functioning relationship cannot be retroactively classified as rape mer…: Intimacy during a functioning relationship cannot be retroactively classified as rape merely because the partnership ended poorly.
The judiciary must rigorously distinguish between consent obtained through intentional fr…: The judiciary must rigorously distinguish between consent obtained through intentional fraud and post-breakup retrospective regret.
Men must retain the agency to leave a relationship without the fear of unwarranted crimin…: Men must retain the agency to leave a relationship without the fear of unwarranted criminal proceedings that threaten their liberty.
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New Delhi: Concerned over the rising trend of filing criminal cases after the failure of relationships, the Supreme Court on Friday said that physical intimacy during good times cannot be branded as rape later just because the alliance soured or broke.
A bench of Justices B V Nagarathna and R Mahdevan, which discharged a Kerala resident man of charges of rape and cheating, said there is a need to distinguish between cases where sexual consent is legally void from the very outset as it was obtained through deliberate deception and fraud, and where a person experiences retrospective regret for past consensual acts simply because of the end of a relationship.
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"In such cases, physical intimacy that occurred during the currency of a functioning relationship cannot be retrospectively branded as an act of rape merely because the relationship soured and no longer subsists," the bench said.
Such reflections in hindsight on their own are unfortunate and cannot constitute a consensual relationship as a crime and set the…
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