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 302/34 and 307 of the Penal Code for holding down the victim while a co-accused fatally shot him, and for firing at a witness who grappled with the co-accused.
At trial, the appellant refused to participate in a Test Identification Parade, claiming he had already been shown to the witness beforehand, so no TIP was held.
He argued before the Supreme Court that his identification for the first time in the trial court, without a prior TIP, should not have been relied upon.
The Court rejected this argument and upheld the conviction, holding that where an accused himself declines to join a TIP on the ground that he has already been shown to a witness, he cannot later complain about the absence of a TIP; the in-court identification by the eyewitness was accepted as reliable.
The appeal was dismissed.
Status: conviction upheld through final appeal.
Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: When an accused deliberately avoids a Test Identification Parade, courts will not let that refusal work in his favour — investigators should document any refusal in writing so that later in-court identification cannot be attacked for want of a TIP.
Case details
| Citation | [2009] 10 S.C.R. 311 |
| Case number | Criminal Appeal No. 900/2006 |
| Court | Indian Supreme Court |
| Decided | 2009-07-07 |
| 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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