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Hari Singh & Another v. The State of Madhya Pradesh

Criminal Appeal · 2019 INSC 1005Decided 5 Sept 2019
Criminal Appeal No. 1660 of 2010
Justice Deepak Gupta · Justice Aniruddha Bose

Background

The victim was allegedly attacked with knives by three men over a money dispute and died in hospital hours later. The trial court convicted the appellants of murder, a conviction upheld by the High Court, relying mainly on two dying declarations attributed to the victim, since every other material witness, including the victim's own children and an injured eyewitness, turned hostile or failed to support the prosecution's version at trial.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court scrutinised the two dying declarations and found serious inconsistencies, including an unexplained and suspicious delay in recording them and the surprising fact that the victim supposedly gave detailed names of his attackers only after his condition had sharply deteriorated, not when he was lucid enough to go to hospital himself. It also found that the lower courts had wrongly placed the burden on the defence to prove the accused's identity, when that burden rests squarely on the prosecution, and noted that identifying descriptions like "Hari the Tempowala" and "son of Nathu" were never properly established. Concluding there was reasonable doubt about the identity of the assailants, the Court gave the accused the benefit of that doubt.

Lesson Learnt

A criminal conviction cannot rest on dying declarations or identifications that are inconsistent, delayed, or otherwise unreliable: the burden always remains on the prosecution to prove the identity of the accused beyond reasonable doubt, and courts cannot shift that burden onto the defence.

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

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