Summary
A man was tried for the 1983 murder of his wife, whose body was found near a railway station in West Bengal after she went missing from a fair, on the strength of an extra-judicial confession allegedly made to three villagers and the recovery of blood-stained clothes and a weapon; the trial court acquitted him, finding the three witnesses contradictory and the recovery unproved, but the Calcutta High Court reversed and convicted him under Section 302 IPC. The Supreme Court restored the acquittal: an extra-judicial confession is weak evidence requiring greater scrutiny, the trial court which saw the witnesses' demeanour found them untrustworthy, the recovery was rightly disbelieved for want of a Section 27 memorandum and because the knife was found in an open place, and an acquittal may be reversed only if perverse or impossible, not where two views are reasonably possible.
Issues
- Whether the High Court was justified in reversing an acquittal and convicting the accused of murder on an extra-judicial confession that the trial court had found unreliable, corroborated only by a recovery the trial court had disbelieved.
Provisions considered
- Section 27, Indian Evidence Act, 1872The recovery of clothes and the knife was rightly disbelieved by the trial court as there was no memorandum statement of the accused and the knife was recovered from an open place accessible to all; the High Court could not use that circumstance to corroborate the confession. (¶¶ 17, 18)
- Section 302, Indian Penal Code, 1860Conviction and life sentence imposed by the High Court set aside and the trial court's acquittal affirmed, the case resting on circumstantial evidence that did not meet the Sharad Birdhichand Sarda standard. (¶¶ 1, 8, 9, 11, 22)
- Section 378, Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973Following Rajesh Prasad, an accused enjoys a double presumption of innocence after acquittal, and the appellate court may not disturb the acquittal unless the finding is perverse or illegal, nor where two reasonable conclusions are possible. (¶¶ 19, 20, 21)
Held
- Following Sahadevan, an extra-judicial confession is weak by itself, must be voluntary, truthful and free of material discrepancies, and gains credibility only from a chain of cogent circumstances; where the prosecution rests entirely on it, the witnesses to it require greater scrutiny. The trial court, with the benefit of seeing the witnesses, found their accounts contradictory and untrustworthy, and that finding was neither perverse nor impossible, so the High Court grossly erred in interfering. (¶¶ 13, 14, 15, 16, 21)
Result
Appeal allowed; Calcutta High Court judgment dated 15.12.2008 in Government Appeal No. 38 of 1987 convicting the appellant under Section 302 IPC quashed and set aside; trial court's acquittal dated 31.03.1987 affirmed; appellant to be set at liberty forthwith if not required in any other case.