Suchand Pal v. Phani Pal & Anr. — Medical evidence inconsistency & inadmissible indirect dying declaration

Part of the Forensic Docket on Legal Desire Forensics — a case where forensic or identification evidence broke down on appeal.

The facts

This murder prosecution under Sections 302 and 307 of the Penal Code and Section 25 of the Arms Act involved conflicting versions of the incident from the prosecution and the defence.

The Supreme Court’s headnote records that the prosecution’s version was inconsistent with the medical evidence on record.

A key piece of prosecution evidence was a purported dying declaration by the deceased — but this had not been made directly by her; it was only her affirmation of a statement given by her husband.

The Court, applying Section 32 of the Evidence Act, held that such a second-hand affirmation does not qualify as an admissible dying declaration, since the deceased did not herself narrate the facts.

Given both the medical inconsistency and the inadmissibility of this declaration, the case against the accused could not be sustained, and the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal.

Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: A dying declaration must be the deceased’s own account, not merely their assent to someone else’s narration — combined with unexplained gaps between the medical findings and the prosecution’s story, this case shows how two independent evidentiary weaknesses can compound to unravel a prosecution.

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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