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Baban Shankar Daphal and Ors. v. The State of Maharashtra

Criminal Appeal · 2025 INSC 97Decided 22 Jan 2025
Crl.A. No.-001675-001675 - 2015
Justice Vikram Nath · Justice Prasanna B. Varale

Background

A long-running family land dispute between brothers in a Maharashtra village turned violent in 1987 after the victim sold a neem tree that his nephew claimed a share in. Days later, the victim was fatally beaten with sticks by several nephews and a niece-in-law while returning home from his fields; his wife, daughter, and son witnessed the attack. The trial court acquitted all the accused, citing inconsistencies in the eyewitnesses' accounts and a perceived mismatch with the medical evidence, but the Bombay High Court reversed this and convicted four of the accused of murder while upholding one acquittal.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court upheld the High Court's conviction, holding that being related to the victim does not automatically make an eyewitness's testimony unreliable. The law only requires their evidence to be scrutinized with extra care, not disbelieved outright. The minor discrepancies flagged by the trial court, such as exactly when the victim's arm was twisted or who mentioned an assault on his wife, did not go to the heart of the prosecution's case. The Court also held that the post-mortem findings, which showed fatal head injuries from a blunt object, corroborated rather than contradicted the eyewitnesses' account of being beaten with sticks, since medical evidence is meant to support ocular testimony, not override it absent a gross contradiction.

Lesson Learnt

A witness's testimony is not automatically doubtful just because they are related to the victim, and small differences in how eyewitnesses recall a chaotic, violent event do not undermine an otherwise consistent and credible account of what happened.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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