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 prosecuted for sexual assault on a minor under Section 376(2)(f) of the Penal Code.
The prosecutrix identified the accused-appellant in a Test Identification Parade, but roughly six months later, when deposing at trial, both the prosecutrix and another minor eyewitness denied that identification in the dock.
This turnaround led the trial court to acquit the accused.
The High Court reversed the acquittal, holding that the sexual assault on the prosecutrix was independently established by the medical report, and attributing the witnesses’ denial at trial to the appellant having won over the prosecutrix through the passage of time and the resulting delay.
Status: conviction upheld through final appeal.
Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: Witnesses who identified an accused shortly after the crime can be persuaded or intimidated into denying that identification months later at trial — courts should weigh an early TIP identification and corroborating medical evidence over a belated, unexplained turnaround.
Case details
| Citation | [2018] 12 S.C.R. 672 |
| Case number | Criminal Appeal No. 913/2016 |
| Court | Indian Supreme Court |
| Decided | 2018-09-28 |
| 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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