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Nikhil Chandra Mondal vs State of West Bengal (2023): Crl.A. No. 2269 of 2010

Criminal Appeal · 2023 INSC 198Decided 3 Mar 2023
Criminal Appeal No. 2269 of 2010
B.R. Gavai · Sanjay Karol

Background

In March 1983, the body of an unidentified married woman was found near a railway track in West Bengal, apparently murdered with a sharp weapon. Investigation revealed the deceased was the appellant's wife, who had gone missing after attending a village fair with him. The prosecution's case rested mainly on an alleged extra-judicial confession the appellant made to three witnesses, plus the recovery of blood-stained clothes and the murder weapon. The trial court acquitted the appellant in 1987, disbelieving the witnesses' inconsistent testimony, but the Calcutta High Court reversed this in 2008, convicting him and sentencing him to life imprisonment.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court reaffirmed the well-established principles for convicting on circumstantial evidence (from Sharad Birdhichand Sarda): the circumstances must be fully established, consistent only with guilt, and leave no reasonable possibility of innocence. It held that an extra-judicial confession is inherently weak evidence requiring strong independent corroboration, and since the trial court (which had directly observed the witnesses) found their testimonies contradictory and untrustworthy, that finding should not have been disturbed unless perverse or impossible. The Court also found the "recovery" of the weapon flawed since it came from an open, publicly accessible place without a proper memorandum under Section 27 of the Evidence Act, so it could not corroborate the confession. Applying the settled rule that an appellate court should not overturn an acquittal unless the trial court's view was perverse or illegal, the Supreme Court held the High Court had erred in reversing the acquittal, set aside the conviction, and restored the acquittal, ordering the appellant's release.

Lesson Learnt

An extra-judicial confession alone, especially one that is inconsistently narrated by witnesses and lacks strong independent corroboration, is too weak a foundation to overturn a trial court's acquittal: appellate courts must respect the trial court's firsthand assessment of witness credibility unless that assessment is clearly perverse or impossible.

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

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