Part of the Forensic Docket on Legal Desire Forensics — a conviction confirmed through final appeal, kept here as a method-of-crime record.
The facts
PW-1, his brother (the eventual victim), and friends had gathered at a restaurant for dinner.
Over a slight pretext, the appellant and other accused, who were present in the restaurant, surrounded their table; the appellant stabbed the victim, and PW-1, who intervened, was also injured.
The victim was taken to hospital but was declared dead.
The trial court doubted PW-1’s presence at the scene at the relevant time and also raised doubts about the Test Identification Parade conducted in the case, and on that basis acquitted all the accused.
The High Court, however, confirmed the appellant’s conviction under Section 304 Part II, and the Supreme Court dismissed the further appeal, thereby affirming that conviction despite the doubts the trial court had raised about the identification parade.
Status: conviction upheld through final appeal.
Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: Shows that doubts about a Test Identification Parade are not automatically fatal where an appellate court finds the rest of the evidentiary record — witness presence, conduct, and circumstances — sufficiently reliable to sustain the identification.
Case details
| Citation | [2011] 4 S.C.R. 25 |
| Case number | CRIMINAL APPEAL No. 1033/2005 |
| Court | Indian Supreme Court |
| Decided | 2011-03-30 |
| Module | MO Archive |
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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