Part of the Forensic Docket on Legal Desire Forensics — how a forensic technique fared under appellate scrutiny.
The facts
Three accused faced charges arising out of an incident with two victims: the first victim suffered a gunshot injury to the leg, and the second victim died, with the accused convicted under Section 302 IPC for that death.
On appeal, the Supreme Court held that the postmortem report showed only lacerated wounds on the body of the second, deceased victim, and that there was no gunshot wound on his body at all.
Because the medical evidence thus contradicted the prosecution’s theory that the fatal injury was a gunshot, the accused were given the benefit of doubt and acquitted of the murder charge, though they were found guilty of a lesser offence in relation to the injuries actually established.
Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: A clean illustration of postmortem findings directly falsifying a specific charge: when the autopsy contradicts the alleged mechanism of injury, courts will not stretch the evidence to sustain the graver charge, even while a lesser offence proved by the same facts survives — investigators should ensure the charged mechanism of injury and the autopsy findings actually match.
Case details
| Citation | [2011] 2 S.C.R. 483 |
| Case number | Criminal Appeal No. 807/2007 |
| Court | Indian Supreme Court |
| Decided | 2011-02-03 |
| 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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