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Santosh Gurung v. State of Sikkim

Criminal Appeal · 2026 INSC 1073Decided 1 Oct 2026
Criminal Appeal No. 107 of 2018
Justice Ujjal Bhuyan · Justice Atul S. Chandurkar

Background

The appellant was convicted of raping and murdering his young niece, who had gone missing after accompanying him on an errand in 2013 and was found dead six days later. He was convicted under the POCSO Act and IPC provisions for rape, murder, and causing evidence to disappear, based on circumstantial evidence including an alleged last-seen-together circumstance, a disclosure-based recovery, DNA evidence, and forensic reports. Both the Sessions Court and the Sikkim High Court upheld the conviction and life sentence.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court allowed the appeal and acquitted the appellant, finding the prosecution's chain of circumstantial evidence seriously flawed. The witnesses who claimed to have last seen the appellant with the victim were themselves uncertain in their testimony; the recovery of evidence under Section 27 of the Evidence Act was made from a location that was openly visible to others, weakening its evidentiary value; and most strikingly, the DNA/forensic report on recovered bone extracts showed them to be of male origin, while the victim was female, meaning the key forensic evidence did not even match the victim. The Court reiterated that an accused's statement under Section 313 CrPC (where he responds to the case against him) cannot be used to fill gaps left by weak prosecution evidence, and since the circumstantial chain was incomplete even before considering that statement, the conviction could not stand. Both lower courts' judgments were quashed, and the appellant was ordered released.

Lesson Learnt

In circumstantial-evidence cases, forensic and DNA evidence must actually corroborate the alleged crime: a conviction cannot survive where the most crucial scientific evidence, on its own terms, points away from rather than toward the prosecution's theory.

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

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