SUPREME COURT ACQUITS MURDER ACCUSED, SAYS INVESTIGATING OFFICERS MUST COLLECT EVIDENCE, NOT FABRICATE IT:

The Supreme Court has reiterated that the responsibility of an investigating officer is to collect evidence and not manufacture it to strengthen the prosecution's case. The Court observed that when the police record a witness's statement without explaining the circumstances that necessitated it, serious doubts may arise regarding whether the witness was introduced to create evidence. Applying this principle, a Bench of Justice Manoj Misra and Justice Vijay Bishnoi dismissed the State of Himachal Pradesh's appeal and upheld the High Court's acquittal of a woman accused of murdering her stepmother and minor stepbrother.

The case arose after the father of the deceased woman reported on September 7, 2011, that she had been missing for six to seven days and that a foul smell was emanating from her locked house. Upon breaking open the lock, the police discovered the bodies of the woman and her minor son. The post-mortem examination indicated that both had died by strangulation, with death estimated to have occurred five to seven days earlier. The prosecution alleged that the accused, the deceased woman's stepdaughter, had last been seen at the house on August 31, 2011, and had committed the murders over a property dispute involving property allegedly bequeathed to the minor boy.

The Sessions Court at Chamba convicted the accused under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code on November 7, 2012. However, the Himachal Pradesh High Court subsequently allowed her appeal after finding the prosecution evidence unreliable. The State challenged the acquittal before the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court noted that an appellate court should interfere with an acquittal only when the decision is perverse or when material evidence has been discarded on untenable grounds. On examining the evidence, the Bench found that the father's account of the accused being last seen at the house contained improvements over his earlier statement. His failure to report the alleged circumstance for several days also remained unexplained.

The Court expressed serious reservations about the prosecution's reliance on a taxi driver and a hotel employee to corroborate the last-seen theory. The investigating officer failed to explain why their statements had been recorded, while the taxi driver's statement was recorded only after the accused's arrest. The hotel also had no record of the accused's stay. The Bench observed that the unexplained circumstances surrounding the recording of these statements raised the possibility that the witnesses had been introduced to construct evidence rather than to disclose information naturally available to them.

The Court also examined the forensic evidence showing a DNA match between the accused and dried blood found on a trunk in the victims' house. It held that the finding established, at most, that she had been present there at some point, but did not prove her presence on August 31, 2011. Since she regularly visited the house, the possibility that an earlier injury had caused the blood to be deposited could not be excluded. The prosecution had not found her blood on the victims' clothes or on any material allegedly used to strangle them.

Additionally, the prosecution failed to establish that the broken lock was the same lock tested against the recovered keys. The police had also failed to collect mobile-phone tower-location data or produce the deceased's call records. The Court found the alleged motive unproved and noted that the medical evidence did not exclude the possibility that the deaths occurred after September 1, 2011. Finding that the prosecution had failed to establish the accused's guilt beyond reasonable doubt, the Supreme Court dismissed the State's appeal and upheld the acquittal.