Anand Jakkappa Pujari @ Gaddadar v. The State of Karnataka
Background
The appellant and a co-accused (whose connected appeal was heard together) were convicted by the trial court, and the conviction affirmed by the Karnataka High Court, for the murder of a woman who went missing in March 2013 near Mudhol. The prosecution's case rested mainly on two circumstances: the accused being "last seen together" with the deceased, and disclosure statements said to have led to "discovery" of facts (such as the place of killing and where the body was burnt) admissible under Section 27 of the Evidence Act.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court set aside the conviction and acquitted the appellants. It held that the discovery evidence was inadmissible because it arose from a joint, simultaneous statement made by multiple accused together, without any way to distinguish which accused's statement led distinctly to which discovered fact: Section 27 requires the information to relate directly and distinctly to a fact discovered through that specific person's disclosure, and there can be no "re-discovery" or blended joint discovery of this kind. With the discovery evidence excluded, only the "last seen together" circumstance remained, which the Court held was, by itself, too weak to sustain a murder conviction beyond reasonable doubt: the prosecution's case "may be true" is not the same as it "must be true."
Lesson Learnt
In circumstantial-evidence prosecutions, a joint disclosure statement by several accused together cannot be used as "discovery" evidence under Section 27 of the Evidence Act unless it distinctly attributes a specific discovered fact to a specific accused; and "last seen together" alone, without corroborating links in the chain, cannot support a conviction for a serious offence like murder.