Part of the Forensic Docket on Legal Desire Forensics — a conviction confirmed through final appeal, kept here as a method-of-crime record.
The facts
The appellant was convicted under Sections 302 and 307 of the Penal Code and Sections 3 and 5 of the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1987.
Two eyewitnesses identified the appellant during trial, even though certain other eyewitnesses were unable to identify him, and this in-court identification was corroborated by an earlier Test Identification Parade.
The Supreme Court restated the settled evidentiary principle that the purpose of a TIP is to provide corroboration to a witness’s identification given in court, so that where the substantive evidence of a witness in court is itself found to be reliable, a TIP mainly serves to reinforce rather than substitute for that testimony.
On this basis, the conviction was held sustainable and the appeal was dismissed.
Status: conviction upheld through final appeal.
Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: A Test Identification Parade is corroborative, not a precondition — when the eyewitness’s courtroom testimony is independently credible, a properly conducted TIP simply reinforces it, and a partial failure to identify by other witnesses does not automatically defeat an otherwise reliable identification.
Case details
| Citation | [2001] 1 S.C.R. 1115 |
| Case number | Criminal Appeal No. 416/1998 |
| Court | Indian Supreme Court |
| Decided | 2001-02-20 |
| Module | MO Archive |
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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