Part of the Forensic Docket on Legal Desire Forensics — how a forensic technique fared under appellate scrutiny.
The facts
A mob comprising several persons, allegedly armed with guns and sharp-edged weapons, opened fire and also launched an assault, resulting in the death of two persons, giving rise to charges under Sections 302 and 307 IPC read with Section 149 for unlawful assembly with a common object.
The prosecution’s case, as accepted by the courts below, was that one of the accused, referred to as ‘B’, had fired his gun, and that the fatal shot which struck one of the deceased had been fired from that gun.
This finding was corroborated not only by the ocular testimony of eyewitnesses but also by the forensic evidence of the ballistics expert and by seizures made from the spot.
On this basis, ‘B’ was held to have been rightly convicted by the courts below.
Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: Ballistics evidence performing its classic function — tying a specific weapon and shooter to a specific fatal shot — and corroborating eyewitness testimony in a chaotic multi-accused mob-violence case; a model of how ballistic and scene-recovery evidence should be marshalled to individuate culpability within an unlawful assembly.
Case details
| Citation | [2013] 13 S.C.R. 633 |
| Case number | Criminal Appeal No. 1853/2009 |
| Court | Indian Supreme Court |
| Decided | 2013-07-04 |
| Module | Case Method Library |
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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