Amit v. State of Uttar Pradesh — Test Identification Parade held unnecessary where accused known to witness

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

The facts

The appellant was alleged to have taken away a minor girl from her house, in the presence of her mother and grandmother, on the pretext of giving her biscuits, and to have then raped and murdered her, giving rise to charges under Sections 364, 376, 377, 302 and 201 IPC.

On appeal, the Supreme Court held there was no evidence to suggest that the victim’s grandmother had any interest in falsely implicating the appellant, and that because the appellant was a neighbour already known to the grandmother, no Test Identification Parade was necessary for her to identify him.

The appeal was partly allowed.

Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: Where the identifying witness already knows the accused personally, as a neighbour, the absence of a formal Test Identification Parade is not a defect — familiarity itself does the work a parade would otherwise be needed for.

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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