Supreme Court Clarifies Standards for Approver Testimony and Appellate Review

A protracted and bitter litigation over a 2-acre parcel of land in Kanyakumari District, resulted in a crime, committed in broad daylight in September 2013. This crime was driven by the frustration of unsuccessful legal battles.

Dr. Subbiah (deceased), a reputed physician at Chennai, refused to compromise with the accused-family. The family hatched a plant and engaged a land-grabbing mafia and henchmen to eliminate the doctor. The conspiracy involved multiple meetings where "blood money" was negotiated, photographs of the victim were exchanged, and a reccy of the hospital was conducted before three assailants eventually attacked the doctor with sickles.

The Trial Court found all nine accused guilty, sentencing seven to death, but it was reversed by the Madras High Court, thereby acquitting all the respondents in 2024, as the High Court primarily doubted the testimony of the approver (PW12) and discarded the electronic evidence.

The Supreme Court, however, allowed the State's appeal, restoring the convictions of all nine respondents while commuting the death sentences to life imprisonment, as the State did not press for capital punishment.

The Bench led by Justice Satish Chandra Sharma, provided several significant legal clarifications regarding the standard of proof and the mechanics of criminal procedure and observed that the High Court had exceeded its jurisdiction by replacing the Trial Court’s "legally possible view" with its own subjective assessments and "fictional probabilities".

On the matter of "Approver Testimony and Disclosure" the Apex Court held that the High Court adopted an "infirm approach" by rejecting the approver’s testimony simply because it contained more details than his initial police statement.

With this judgement the Apex Court reitrated the restriction on appellate courts during the review of an acquittal and emphasized that the job of an appellate court is not to conduct a "re-trial" or to substitute its own opinion for that of the Trial Court. As long as the Trial Court’s finding is a "possible view," it should not be disturbed unless it is proven to be perverse, illegal, or impossible.

While the Apex Court restored the convictions, it nevertheless, agreed with the High Court on the unreliability of the CCTV footage and Gait Analysis report in this specific case.

The Bench noted a "distorted chain of custody," including the failure to extract the hard disk for over a month and the destruction of the original DVR, which created reasonable doubt regarding the integrity of the footage. However, this rejection was not fatal to the prosecution because the eye-witness accounts and the established money trail remained "wholly incriminating".

The Apex Court settled a constitutional question regarding the Re-enactment of Crime Scenes, and ruled that merely directing an accused to walk or imitate a sequence for identification data (like gait analysis) does not violate Article 20(3) of the Constitution. Such acts are not "personal testimony" unless the accused is led into demonstrating facts from their own private knowledge.

Thought the Apex Court upheld the conviction of the accused, however, in a rare exercise of compassion, the Court used Article 142 to suspend their arrest of two elderly parents (A1 and A2) for eight weeks, allowing them to seek a pardon from the Governor of Tamil Nadu under Article 161. The Court noted the two elderly parents (A1 and A2) were likely driven by a "deeply misplaced sense of parental obligation" in commiting the crime.

CORAM: JUSTICE M.M. SUNDRESH AND JUSTICE SATISH CHANDRA SHARMA.