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Ishwari Lal Yadav v. State of Chhattisgarh

Criminal Appeal · 2019 INSC 1115Decided 3 Oct 2019
Criminal Appeal Nos. 1416-1417 of 2017
Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman · Justice R. Subhash Reddy · Justice Surya Kant

Background

A two-year-old boy, Chirag, went missing from outside his home in Chhattisgarh in November 2010. Neighbourhood residents, alerted by loud music from the house of Ishwari Lal Yadav and his wife Kiran Bai (who practised tantrism and were regarded as "gurus"), broke in and allegedly extracted confessions that the couple and several associates had kidnapped and killed the child as a human sacrifice to attain spiritual powers. The trial court convicted the accused of kidnapping, murder and criminal conspiracy, sentencing the two main accused to death and the others to life imprisonment; the Chhattisgarh High Court confirmed the convictions but commuted the main accused's death sentences to life imprisonment without remission. Multiple connected appeals by different sets of accused were heard together by the Supreme Court.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that while the extra-judicial confessions alone could not sustain the convictions, they were sufficiently corroborated by consistent testimony from independent eyewitnesses, recovery of the child's remains and clothing from the main accused's house, and forensic (DNA) evidence. The Court found the evidence insufficient to prove the separate charge of criminal conspiracy (Section 120B IPC) and kidnapping (Section 364 IPC), and acquitted the appellants of those specific charges, but confirmed their conviction for murder (Section 302 IPC) and for causing disappearance of evidence by burying the body (Section 201 IPC). For the two main accused, Ishwari Lal Yadav and Kiran Bai, the Court restored the death sentence (reversing the High Court's commutation to life), treating the case as "rarest of rare" given the brutality of the killing and the fact that the couple had an earlier, similar conviction for sacrificing another child. The appeals of the other co-accused (Nihaluddin, Rajendra Kumar and others), who were peripherally implicated, were allowed and their convictions set aside.

Lesson Learnt

An extra-judicial confession, though inherently weak evidence, can support a conviction when strongly corroborated by independent witnesses and forensic proof; and a prior conviction for a strikingly similar crime can be treated by courts as an aggravating factor when deciding whether a case qualifies as "rarest of rare" for the death penalty.

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

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