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Mehtab Singh & Anr. vs. State of Delhi

Criminal Appeal · 2026:DHC:7641Decided 7 Sept 2026New Delhi Bench
CRL.A. 10/2002CNR: DLHC010056062002
Justice Vimal Kumar Yadav

Background

The appellants (Mehtab Singh, who died during the appeal's pendency and whose case abated, and Jitender) were convicted in 2001, along with a third co-accused (Savita), for the dowry death of a woman, and sentenced to 10 years' rigorous imprisonment. Their appeal was earlier dismissed by the High Court in 2017, but the Supreme Court set that aside in 2019 and remanded the case for a fresh hearing on merits. When the matter resumed, the original trial court record, including witness testimony, the accused's statements, and the defence evidence, had gone missing and could not be reconstructed despite years of effort by the police and the court's Registry.

Decision Breakdown

Since the record needed to meaningfully review the conviction was permanently lost, and a retrial was impractical roughly 25 years after the alleged 1996 offence, the Court held that the only fair course (following Supreme Court precedent) was to set aside the conviction and sentence entirely, rather than let it stand unreviewed or order an unrealistic retrial.

Lesson Learnt

A criminal conviction cannot be allowed to stand on appeal if the court record needed to review it is irretrievably lost through no fault of the accused: the law treats this as effectively requiring acquittal, since the appellate review that due process guarantees becomes impossible.

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