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Ramji Singh & Ors. v. The State of Uttar Pradesh

Criminal Appeal · 2019 INSC 1357Decided 11 Dec 2019
Criminal Appeal No. 1397 of 2014
Justice Mohan M. Shantanagoudar · Justice Deepak Gupta

Background

Following a land and election dispute, the deceased, Sarman Singh, was allegedly surrounded and killed in broad daylight in 1982 by six accused armed with guns, axes, and a pitchfork, after an earlier altercation that morning. The trial court acquitted all the accused, doubting the eyewitnesses because of perceived contradictions with medical evidence and the site plan. The State's appeal succeeded in the High Court, which convicted three of the surviving accused (the others had died during the appeal) and sentenced them to life imprisonment; those three then appealed to the Supreme Court.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that the two eyewitnesses' accounts were consistent, were scribed into a written complaint immediately after the incident (leaving no real time to fabricate a story), and were fully corroborated by the medical evidence, including matching the number of gunshot wounds to the two accused said to have fired three shots each. It rejected the defence's reliance on a site plan (not drawn to scale) and on minor witness relationships/enmity, noting that enmity cuts both ways and does not by itself discredit truthful witnesses, especially given the chilling effect of armed assailants threatening onlookers at the scene. It also held that failure to forensically test recovered firearms did not undermine clear, medically-corroborated eyewitness testimony. The appeal was dismissed and the convictions and life sentences were upheld.

Lesson Learnt

Eyewitness testimony recorded promptly after an incident and corroborated by medical evidence can sustain a murder conviction even where the accused and witnesses were on hostile terms, a site plan is imprecise, or investigators failed to complete forensic ballistic testing: courts look at the overall consistency and corroboration of the evidence, not isolated technical gaps.

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

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