Sister Mina Lalita Baruwa v. State of Orissa and Others — Test Identification Parade record inconsistency; right to recall the TIP witness

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

The facts

In a prosecution under Section 376(2)(g) IPC, the evidence given at trial by PW-18, the statutory authority who had conducted the Test Identification Parade, was found not to be in consonance with the actual record of that parade.

An application to recall this witness was dismissed by the courts below under Section 301 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

The Supreme Court held that this was a serious irregularity, and that the lower courts should have made an attempt to reconcile Sections 301 and 311 of the Code so as to ensure the trial proceeded correctly, rather than shutting out the recall application on a narrow reading of Section 301.

Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: When a Test Identification Parade witness’s courtroom testimony does not match the parade record itself, that mismatch has to be resolved on the record, not brushed aside on procedure — the Court treated the right to probe that discrepancy as more important than a technical reading of who may call which witness.

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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