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Sunita v. State of Haryana

Criminal Appeal · 2019 INSC 828Decided 30 Jul 2019
Criminal Appeal No. 546 of 2010
Justice L. Nageswara Rao · Justice Hemant Gupta

Background

The appellant was convicted of murdering Sushila, the wife of a relative she was alleged to be living with after the death of his first wife, based entirely on circumstantial evidence: the case had no eyewitnesses. The prosecution's case rested on DNA identification of a burned body found in a village roughly 55 km from where the appellant lived, testimony that the appellant was last seen with the deceased, a claimed extra-judicial confession to a relative of the deceased's family, and recovery of a scooter allegedly used to transport the body. Both the Trial Court and the High Court had convicted and upheld the conviction, prompting this further appeal.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court undertook a detailed re-examination of each strand of circumstantial evidence and found the chain incomplete and unreliable. It held the High Court had wrongly invoked Section 106 of the Evidence Act (which shifts the burden to explain facts especially within one's knowledge) because the site where the body was found was an open field not in the appellant's possession, so no such burden arose. The claimed extra-judicial confession was found untrustworthy for lack of any special circumstance explaining why the appellant would confess to that particular witness, and the recovered scooter had no forensic link (no blood or other evidence) connecting it to the crime. Since the prosecution failed to establish where or how Sushila was actually killed, and the "last seen" evidence alone could not complete the chain of circumstances, the Court gave the appellant the benefit of the doubt, allowed the appeal, and acquitted her.

Lesson Learnt

A conviction based purely on circumstantial evidence requires every link in the chain to be fully and reliably established, pointing only to the guilt of the accused: gaps such as an unexplained extra-judicial confession or forensically unconnected recovered items are enough to entitle an accused to acquittal on benefit of the doubt.

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

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