Part of the Forensic Docket on Legal Desire Forensics — a case where forensic or identification evidence broke down on appeal.
The facts
The victim died of a firearm injury.
The trial court convicted the accused under Section 302 of the Penal Code, but the High Court acquitted him, finding the ocular evidence discordant with the medical evidence and noting that injuries on the accused himself had not been explained.
The State’s appeal to the Supreme Court was dismissed.
The Court held that, going by the ocular account, the injury to the deceased’s head, together with a single exit wound, was compatible with the use of a rifle rather than a shotgun; given the doctor’s categorical evidence in examination-in-chief that the injury was consistent with a single-projectile 12-bore cartridge, the prosecution’s claim that a shotgun had been used became doubtful.
Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: A single exit wound and a precise ballistic-medical opinion were enough to unravel the prosecution’s stated weapon — a textbook illustration of how a mismatch between the alleged weapon and the wound pattern can be fatal to a firearm-death case.
Case details
| Citation | [2009] 13 S.C.R. 609 |
| Case number | Criminal Appeal No. 1252/2006 |
| Court | Indian Supreme Court |
| Decided | 2009-08-11 |
| Module | Failure Registry |
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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