Raju @ Raj Kumar v. State of Rajasthan — Postmortem and bloodstain corroboration of a stabbing

Part of the Forensic Docket on Legal Desire Forensics — how a forensic technique fared under appellate scrutiny.

The facts

The prosecution’s case, arising from an incident when PW-4 and his father (the deceased) had gone to a relative’s house for dinner, was that the appellant stabbed the deceased on the chest with a knife.

The appellant was convicted under Section 148 IPC (rioting, armed with a deadly weapon) on the strength of the postmortem report and eyewitness testimony, and the knife and clothes recovered were found to bear human bloodstains.

The Supreme Court held there was no infirmity in this conviction, since the medical and bloodstain evidence corroborated the eyewitness account.

However, the trial court had additionally convicted the appellant under Section 302 IPC (murder) in the very appeal he himself had filed against his Section 148 conviction.

The Supreme Court held this impermissible — an appellant’s own appeal cannot be used to convict him of a graver offence — and set aside the Section 302 conviction on that ground, leaving the Section 148 conviction, supported by the forensic evidence, undisturbed.

Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: The postmortem report and bloodstained knife did their job here — they held up the conviction that was actually before the court; the case is a reminder to keep the forensic record separate in one’s mind from the procedural rules about what an appeal can and cannot do to a sentence.

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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