Ajitsinh Chehuji Rathod v. State of Gujarat & Anr. — Belated handwriting-expert request for signature comparison rejected at appellate stage

Part of the Forensic Docket on Legal Desire Forensics — how a forensic technique fared under appellate scrutiny.

The facts

The appellant had been convicted under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881, over a dishonoured cheque, and claimed at trial that the signature on the cheque did not match his own.

His application to have the signature examined and compared by a handwriting expert was rejected by the trial court.

At the appellate stage, he then sought to introduce additional evidence — the handwriting expert’s opinion — under Section 391 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

The Supreme Court held that the appellate court was justified in dismissing this application, and that the appellant was not entitled to seek a direction for a fresh handwriting-expert opinion at that late stage.

Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: A reminder that a request for handwriting-expert evidence needs to be timely — courts are reluctant to admit such expert opinion for the first time on appeal when it could and should have been pursued at trial.

Case details

Read the full judgment (PDF), sourced from the Indian Supreme Court Judgments open dataset (AWS Open Data Registry, CC-BY-4.0).

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