Digamber Vaishnav & Anr. v. State of Chhattisgarh — Fingerprint evidence & chain of custody

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

The facts

Murder-robbery conviction built partly on a fingerprint report lifted from the scene, plus a child witness, section 27 recoveries, and a ‘last seen together’ theory.

The Supreme Court acquitted: the fingerprint expert who examined the articles was never examined in court, the person who took the sample prints was never examined, no explanation was given for why the marked articles were simply left at the scene after the prints were lifted rather than seized immediately, and no prints were found on the doors or the almirah that the robbery theory required.

A panch witness’s account of where the bottle was actually lying also raised doubts about the lifting process itself.

Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: A fingerprint match is only as strong as the two people behind it: the officer who lifted the print and the examiner who compared it. If either is not put in the witness box, and the seizure sequence around the print isn’t accounted for, the report collapses under appeal however conclusive it looked 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).

Explore more in the Forensic Docket or browse the full Forensics hub.