Krishan Kumar & Anr. vs The State of Haryana
Background
Devinder, a young student, went missing in June 1999 and his decomposed body was later found in a canal. His brother-in-law's relatives Krishan Kumar and Joginder Singh were accused of strangling him after allegedly finding him with their sister/relative Poonam in a compromising position at a fodder room, and of dumping his body in a canal. The trial court convicted them of murder and destruction of evidence based purely on circumstantial evidence (an inferred "last seen" circumstance, an extra-judicial confession to a relative, recovery of a scarf allegedly used to strangle the victim, and motive), and the Punjab and Haryana High Court confirmed the conviction. The convicts appealed to the Supreme Court.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court scrutinized each link in the prosecution's chain of circumstantial evidence and found all of them fatally weak. No witness had actually testified to seeing the accused and the deceased together shortly before the death. The trial court had merely inferred this presence from other testimony, an approach the Court held was legally impermissible since the "last seen" theory requires positive evidence, not presumption stacked on presumption. The alleged eyewitness's account contained a material contradiction with his earlier police statement that undercut the very core of the prosecution's story. The extra-judicial confession, allegedly made to a relative (PW-7) who was vague and evasive about his own relationship to the parties, did not inspire confidence, especially since there was no explanation of how the accused would even have known where the victim was. The scarf said to be the murder weapon was recovered from an open, publicly accessible passage without any independent witness, making that recovery evidentially worthless. Since individually and collectively none of the circumstances excluded the possibility of innocence, the Court held both lower courts had appreciated the evidence perversely, set aside the conviction, and acquitted the appellants, discharging their bail bonds.
Lesson Learnt
A conviction built entirely on circumstantial evidence can stand only if every link in the chain is proved by direct, credible evidence and, together, excludes every reasonable possibility of innocence. Courts cannot fill evidentiary gaps (such as an unproven "last seen" circumstance) through inference or presumption stacked upon another presumption.