Part of the Forensic Docket on Legal Desire Forensics — how a forensic technique fared under appellate scrutiny.
The facts
The appellant, a Head Constable, had been convicted under Section 307 IPC and Section 27 of the Arms Act and sentenced to three years’ rigorous imprisonment on each count.
The prosecution’s case, as accepted on appeal, was that the appellant, in an inebriated state, entered the complainant’s office and, after drinking water, pulled out his service pistol and aimed it at the complainant, directing two other witnesses (PW-3 and PW-4) to leave the room.
The CFSL report established that the cartridge recovered from the complainant’s office had been fired from the appellant’s service weapon, directly linking him to the firing.
The case was disposed of as partly allowed, though the headnote text does not preserve the precise relief granted beyond confirming this ballistic linkage.
Why this belongs in the Forensic Docket: Even where CFSL ballistic matching squarely establishes that a particular weapon fired the recovered cartridge, the overall disposition can still be modified on other grounds — a reminder to keep the forensic finding of fact analytically separate from the ultimate sentencing outcome.
Case details
| Citation | [2021] 10 S.C.R. 1061 |
| Case number | Criminal Appeal No. 2373/2010 |
| Court | Indian Supreme Court |
| Decided | 2021-11-26 |
| Module | Case Method Library |
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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