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 FIR named the accused and specified the role played by each of them in a murder charged under Sections 302 and 34 IPC, and motive was proved; the ultimate cause of death was found to be the assault by a co-accused.
Four of the prosecution’s witnesses turned hostile during trial, but the first informant’s version remained consistent throughout.
The Supreme Court held that a conviction can be sustained even on the testimony of a single witness, and that a court may rely on part of a hostile witness’s deposition while rejecting the rest, depending on the facts of the case.
The conviction was accordingly upheld.
Status: conviction upheld through final appeal.
Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: Hostile witnesses do not automatically sink a prosecution — courts can, and here did, extract the reliable part of a hostile deposition and combine it with a consistent first-informant account to sustain a conviction.
Case details
| Citation | [2007] 5 S.C.R. 850 |
| Case number | Criminal Appeal No. 634/2007 |
| Court | Indian Supreme Court |
| Decided | 2007-04-27 |
| 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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