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The State of Rajasthan vs Kistoora Ram

Criminal Appeal · 2022 INSC 760Decided 28 Jul 2022
Criminal Appeal No. 2119 of 2010
B.R. Gavai · Pamidighantam Sri Narasimha

Background

The respondent was accused of killing his wife with a lathi, dragging her body about 100 feet from their house, and setting it on fire to destroy evidence. The trial court convicted him of murder (Section 302 IPC) and destruction of evidence (Section 201 IPC), sentencing him to life imprisonment. On appeal, the Rajasthan High Court reversed the conviction and acquitted him, chiefly because the case rested on an alleged extra-judicial confession made to one witness, while another key witness had turned hostile. The State of Rajasthan appealed to the Supreme Court against this acquittal.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court reiterated the well-settled, narrow standard for interfering with an acquittal: interference is warranted only where the High Court's view is impossible or perverse, not merely because another view (conviction) is equally or more probable. It found the High Court's reasoning sound: the extra-judicial confession was, by settled law, a weak piece of evidence requiring independent corroboration, and with the corroborating recovery evidence disbelieved by the trial court itself and a key witness turned hostile, the acquittal could not be called perverse or impossible. The Supreme Court therefore declined to interfere and dismissed the State's appeal, upholding the acquittal.

Lesson Learnt

An extra-judicial confession alone, without solid corroboration, is treated by courts as weak evidence insufficient to sustain a murder conviction; and once a High Court has acquitted an accused on a reasonable view of the evidence, the Supreme Court will not overturn that acquittal just because a conviction was also a possible reading of the facts.

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

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