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Tukesh Singh and Ors. v. State of Chhattisgarh

Criminal Appeal · 2025 INSC 683Decided 14 May 2025
Criminal Appeal No. 1157 of 2011 (with Criminal Appeal Nos. 1608 of 2011 and 1713 of 2012)
Justice Abhay S. Oka · Justice Pankaj Mithal · Justice Ahsanuddin Amanullah

Background

Nine men were accused of forming an unlawful assembly and, armed with swords, an axe, rods and clubs, attacking a group at a medical shop in Chhattisgarh in March 2001, killing two people (Manrakhan Singh and Narayan Singh) and injuring several others. The Trial Court convicted eight of them under Sections 302/149 and other IPC provisions, sentencing them to life imprisonment, and the Chhattisgarh High Court upheld the conviction. The convicts appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that a related counter-case was wrongly tried separately and that the prosecution's eyewitnesses gave inconsistent, unreliable testimony.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court closely examined the depositions of the five injured eyewitnesses and found a critical, recurring flaw: although each witness claimed to know some of the accused and ascribed specific violent acts to them in their examination-in-chief, none of them was ever asked, in open court, to actually point out and identify the accused sitting in the dock as the very persons they had seen committing the crime. The Court held that simply naming an accused in a deposition is not enough, in-court identification linking the named accused to the person present in the dock is essential, especially where no Test Identification Parade was held. Combined with significant omissions and contradictions between the witnesses' police statements and their court testimony, the Court found the prosecution's case not proved beyond reasonable doubt. It quashed the convictions and acquitted all the appellants, who had already served 9-14 years before being released on bail.

Lesson Learnt

In criminal trials, a witness naming an accused as the person who committed an act is legally insufficient on its own: the witness must also identify that person in court as the individual sitting in the dock; without this in-court identification (or a proper Test Identification Parade), a conviction cannot safely rest on the eyewitness's account.

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

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