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Devraj v. State of Chhattisgarh

Criminal Appeal · Neutral citation not assigned (Criminal Appeal No. 423 of 2015)Decided 25 Jul 2016
Criminal Appeal No. 423 of 2015
Justice S.A. Bobde · Justice Ashok Bhushan

Background

Following a land dispute between the deceased, Devi Prasad, and his cousins Devraj and Dinda @ Deenanath, the deceased was intercepted and beaten to death with sticks near a tree on 26 June 2006, and his body was thrown off a bridge along with his motorcycle. The trial court convicted Devraj and Dinda of murder and destruction of evidence based on three eyewitnesses, while acquitting four other co-accused; the Chhattisgarh High Court later acquitted Dinda but upheld Devraj's murder conviction (setting aside only the evidence-destruction charge). Devraj appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that two of the three eyewitnesses had been declared "hostile" and should not have been relied upon, and that the third had not directly implicated him.

Decision Breakdown

The Court reiterated the well-settled principle that under Article 136 of the Constitution, it does not ordinarily re-appreciate evidence or disturb concurrent findings of fact by the trial court and High Court, intervening only where the findings are perverse, unsupportable by the evidence, or tainted by an error of law or procedure. It held that a witness being declared "hostile" does not automatically make their entire testimony unusable: courts can and did rely on the portions of the hostile witnesses' statements found credible and corroborated by other evidence. Finding that the concurrent findings of the trial court and High Court were well-supported by reliable eyewitness testimony and not perverse, the Supreme Court found no merit in the appeal and dismissed it, upholding Devraj's conviction and life sentence for murder.

Lesson Learnt

Being declared a "hostile" witness does not wipe out everything that witness said: a court can still believe and rely on the parts of their testimony that are corroborated by other evidence; and the Supreme Court will not re-weigh evidence to overturn a conviction unless the lower courts' findings were clearly perverse or legally flawed.

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

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