Pankaj v. State of Rajasthan — Bloodstained clothing not forensically followed up

Part of the Forensic Docket on Legal Desire Forensics — a case where forensic or identification evidence broke down on appeal.

The facts

Pankaj, along with three co-accused, was alleged to have fired a bullet that struck the deceased in the neck, causing him to fall unconscious; he later died of his injuries at hospital.

The trial resulted in convictions under Section 302 IPC, and the High Court upheld Pankaj’s conviction while acquitting the other three accused.

On further appeal, the Supreme Court examined the testimony of the sole eyewitness, PW-8, who stated only that he had taken the deceased to hospital and that blood was oozing from his body.

The headnote records that, despite this, the blood-stained clothes connected with the incident were not followed up on during the investigation in the manner expected — a gap in the forensic record that the Court treated as weakening the reliability of the prosecution’s case against the appellant, resulting in the appeal being allowed.

Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: A single eyewitness’s account of blood at the scene is no substitute for actually collecting and examining the physical evidence; investigators who skip that step hand defence counsel an opening the Supreme Court will use.

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.