Md. Sajjad @ Raju @ Salim v. State of West Bengal
Background
A man's dead body was found strangled in Calcutta in 1993. Based largely on a suspicion voiced by the victim's wife and on three witnesses who claimed to have briefly seen the victim with a group of men near a taxi on the night he disappeared, the appellant was arrested and later convicted of murder by the trial court, a conviction the High Court upheld.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court found that the Test Identification Parade (TIP) used to link the appellant to the group was held 25 days after his arrest and about three months after the incident, with no explanation for the delay. None of the witnesses had given any distinguishing description of the men they briefly saw at night, and their encounter itself lasted only a few fleeting minutes with no reason to specially memorise faces. With the confessional statement of a co-accused already discarded, this weak and delayed identification was the only real evidence against the appellant. The Court held this was insufficient to sustain a conviction, gave the appellant the benefit of the doubt, acquitted him, and extended the same benefit to a co-accused who had not even filed an appeal.
Lesson Learnt
A criminal conviction cannot rest on an identification parade held after a long, unexplained delay where witnesses had only a fleeting, undistinguished glimpse of the accused, and when such doubt applies equally to a co-accused, courts can extend acquittal to that person too, even without their own appeal.