Sunil Mahadeo Jadhav v. State of Maharashtra — Post-mortem evidence and fabricated arrest records in a custodial death

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

The facts

This case arose from the custodial death of a person who was himself a co-accused in a kidnapping case.

The trial court had acquitted the police officials prosecuted for the death under Sections 302, 342, 218 and 193 read with Section 34 of the Penal Code, but the High Court convicted them.

Before the Supreme Court, the prosecution’s own witnesses, PW-21 and PW-22, proved that the arrest panchnama and the arrest register had been fabricated, which meant the charges under Sections 218 (fabricating a false record) and 193 (false evidence) against the accused officials could not be sustained.

The Court also held that a charge under Section 342 could not stand because the deceased was himself an accused in the kidnapping case at the relevant time.

The post-mortem findings on the injuries were noted as bearing on the cause of death, though the available headnote text is cut off before the final conclusion on the homicide charge is stated.

Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: Fabricated custody records — arrest panchnamas, registers — can themselves become the ground on which a prosecution collapses; the integrity of documentary record-keeping around an arrest is as forensically important as physical evidence.

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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