Part of the Forensic Docket on Legal Desire Forensics — how a forensic technique fared under appellate scrutiny.
The facts
The case concerned the kidnapping, rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, prosecuted under Sections 363, 366A, 364, 346, 376D, 376A, 302 and 201 of the Penal Code together with the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012.
The victim’s father, PW-2, had been with her in the evening; she then went missing and was found dead the next morning.
The appellant, along with a co-accused who has since died, was convicted and sentenced to death on the basis of circumstantial evidence.
On appeal, the Supreme Court examined the medical evidence bearing on the case as part of its review of the circumstantial chain, and the appeal was ultimately partly allowed.
Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: A reminder that in circumstantial death-penalty cases, medical evidence must be examined as one link in the whole chain, and can itself be decisive to whether that chain is treated as complete and unbroken.
Case details
| Citation | [2022] 8 S.C.R. 1 |
| Case number | CRIMINAL APPEAL No. 101/2022 |
| Court | Indian Supreme Court |
| Decided | 2022-01-18 |
| 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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