Rajinder Singh v. State of Haryana — Sketchy, unsupported FSL report insufficient to sustain a murder conviction

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

The facts

In the course of a continuing quarrel between two sides of a family, gunfire was exchanged, resulting in the deaths of two people on the complainant’s side and one — the appellant’s own brother — on the appellant’s side.

The courts below had convicted the appellant under Section 302 for the murder of his brother.

On further appeal, the Supreme Court found that, apart from a very sketchy and unsupported FSL (forensic science laboratory) report, there was no other acceptable evidence to show that the appellant was in any way responsible for killing his own brother with his double-barrel gun.

Given the fire had been exchanged between both sides, and the ballistic/forensic material tying the appellant specifically to his brother’s death was inadequate, the Court interfered with the conviction on that count.

Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: A cautionary case for forensic examiners: an FSL report that is thin, unsupported and does not clearly connect a specific accused to a specific death cannot carry a murder conviction on its own, however strong the surrounding circumstances of a gun battle appear.

Case details

Read the full judgment (PDF), sourced from the Indian Supreme Court Judgments open dataset (AWS Open Data Registry, CC-BY-4.0).

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