Bhagwan Jagannath Markad & Ors. v. State of Maharashtra
Background
Of 16 persons originally accused of attacking a family with swords, knives, iron rods and axes, killing one man and injuring six others, the trial court had acquitted all 16. On the State's appeal, the Bombay High Court reversed the acquittal of eight of them and convicted them of murder and rioting, sentencing them to life imprisonment (one of the eight having since died, leaving seven before the Supreme Court along with a related appellant, eight in total). The convicted persons appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing the High Court should not have overturned the trial court's acquittal and that eyewitness testimony was unreliable.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that an appellate court may reverse an acquittal and independently re-appreciate the evidence where the trial court's approach was itself flawed or unreasonable, and that minor discrepancies in eyewitness accounts or non-examination of some witnesses do not undermine the prosecution case where injured eyewitnesses consistently identify the main assailants. Examining the evidence, the Court found that five eyewitnesses consistently named appellants A1 to A7 as having played specific, armed roles in the attack, justifying upholding their convictions under Section 302/149 IPC, but found that two appellants (A10 and A11) had not been clearly named by two of the key witnesses and gave them the benefit of the doubt, acquitting them. The appeal was thus partly allowed: those two were acquitted and ordered released, while the convictions of the remaining appellants were upheld (with two of them permitted to remain on bail briefly to pursue a remission application on grounds of advanced age).
Lesson Learnt
An appellate court can lawfully overturn a trial court's acquittal and convict based on its own re-appreciation of the evidence, but it will still scrutinise each individual accused's role separately: consistent identification by multiple eyewitnesses can sustain a conviction, while the absence of such identification for a particular accused, even in a group attack, can still result in acquittal for that person alone.