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Jodhan v. State of Madhya Pradesh

Criminal Appeal · Neutral citation not assigned (Criminal Appeal No. 1683 of 2010)Decided 8 Apr 2015
Criminal Appeal No. 1683 of 2010
Justice Dipak Misra · Justice N.V. Ramana

Background

In 1984, the appellant and several others allegedly came armed with lathis, a farsa, and handmade bombs to the home of the complainant's family, hurled abuses, and in the ensuing violence one person, Siriya alias Shriram, died from bomb-blast injuries while others were injured. The trial court acquitted all accused, disbelieving the eyewitnesses as interested/related witnesses and citing minor inconsistencies, but the High Court reversed this and convicted the appellant and others under Section 302 read with Section 149 IPC (member of an unlawful assembly where a murder is committed).

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court upheld the High Court's reversal of acquittal, holding that the trial court's view was not a "plausible" one and had wrongly treated minor, trivial contradictions as fatal to the prosecution's case while ignoring that the eyewitnesses were also injured in the same incident, which gives their testimony an in-built guarantee of reliability. The Court held that under Section 149 IPC, a person need not personally strike the fatal blow to be guilty of murder: it is enough that he was a member of an unlawful assembly that shared the common object of attacking the victims, and the appellant's presence and active participation was clearly established. The appeal was accordingly dismissed and the conviction upheld.

Lesson Learnt

Being part of a group that commits a violent crime with a shared common purpose can make a person guilty of the group's worst outcome (such as murder) even without personally inflicting the fatal injury; and testimony from witnesses who were themselves injured in the same incident, even if related to the victim, carries significant evidentiary weight precisely because their presence at the scene is self-evident.

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

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