Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 – s.378 – Indian Evidence Act, 1872 – s.27 – FIR was recorded on finding a dead body – PW-2 (brother of deceased) identified the dead body – Statements of both PW-1, father of deceased and PW-2 were recorded – Both pointed suspicion on appellant-accused – Trial Court by extending the benefit of doubt in favour of appellant passed the order of acquittal – High Court ordered conviction of the appellant – On appeal, held: High Court have not acted within the legal parameters set down for s.378 Cr.PC. by the various judgments of Supreme Court – Recoveries made were doubtful as no independent witness signed the same – Lot of Contradictions in the evidence rendered by prosecution – Motive not established – Chain of Circumstantial evidence was not complete to point toward the guilt of the accused – Report of Ballistic expert is also inconclusive – Judgment of High Court was set aside – Order of acquittal by the trial Court was restored.
Jafarudheen and Others v. State of Kerala 2022 SCC Online SC 495; Mohan Alias Srinivas Alias Seena Alias Tailor Seena v. State of Karnataka 2021 SCC OnLine SC 1233, N. Vijayakumar v. State of T.N. (2021) 3 SCC
687 – relied on.
Tarsem Kumar v. Delhi Administration (1994) Supp 3 SCC 367 : [1994] 2 Suppl. SCR 740; Padala Veera Reddy v. State of A.P. (1989) 2 Supp SCC 706; Chandrakant Ganpat Sovitkar v. State of Maharashtra (1975) 3 SCC 16 – referred to.
As published in the Supreme Court Reports, Supreme Court of India. Text from the Indian Supreme Court Judgments open data set (Dattam Labs), CC BY 4.0.
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