Promode Dey v. State of West Bengal — Bloodstained weapon recovery & medical evidence corroborating child witness

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 of murder under Section 302 of the Penal Code, a conviction affirmed by the High Court.

The prosecution’s case rested substantially on the testimony of a child witness, PW2, who gave what the Supreme Court described as a natural and consistent account of the incident from the time it occurred until she was examined in court.

The Court held that this consistency ruled out any suggestion that PW2 had been tutored to depose against the appellant.

Her evidence was further corroborated by the recovery, on the very date of the incident, of a blood-stained ‘daa’ (a type of chopper) from a jungle beside the appellant’s house.

Medical evidence given by PW10 was also relied upon to support the prosecution version.

On this combined strength of consistent child-witness testimony, contemporaneous weapon recovery and medical corroboration, the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal and upheld the conviction.

Status: conviction upheld through final appeal.

Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: A child witness’s account, when demonstrably consistent from first report to trial, does not need adult corroboration on credibility alone — but investigators should note how much weight the Court still placed on the physical recovery of the blood-stained weapon to anchor that testimony in verifiable fact.

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.