Part of the Forensic Docket on Legal Desire Forensics — how a forensic technique fared under appellate scrutiny.
The facts
The accused were alleged to have assaulted one person, shot another dead, and fled with stolen property worth about Rs.
1.61 lakh, and were tried for dacoity with murder under Section 396 IPC along with offences under the Arms Act.
The trial court acquitted them.
On the State’s appeal against that acquittal, the High Court ordered the accused re-arrested through non-bailable warrants under Section 390 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
The accused challenged this re-arrest order before the Supreme Court.
The Court upheld it, holding that it was justified because the trial court had not properly considered, in proper perspective, the evidence of identification made in court and the results of a DNA test.
It confirmed that Section 390 gives the appellate court hearing an appeal against acquittal the power to order the re-arrest of an acquitted accused.
Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: A useful illustration that a trial court’s failure to properly weigh identification and DNA evidence can itself become grounds for an appellate court to take the unusual step of ordering an acquitted person back into custody pending appeal.
Case details
| Citation | [2009] 3 S.C.R. 348 |
| Case number | CRIMINAL APPEAL No. 385/2009 |
| Court | Indian Supreme Court |
| Decided | 2009-02-25 |
| Module | Case Method Library |
Read the full judgment (PDF), sourced from the Indian Supreme Court Judgments open dataset (AWS Open Data Registry, CC-BY-4.0).
Explore more in the Forensic Docket or browse the full Forensics hub.
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