Deonandan Mishra vs The State Of Bihar

Rewritten Version Notice: This is a rewritten version of the original judgment.

Court: Supreme Court of India

Case Number: Criminal Appeal No. 19 of 1955

Decision Date: 28 September, 1955

Coram: B. Jagannadhadas, Vivian Bose, Bhuvneshwar P. Sinha

In this case, the appeal, filed by special leave, concerned the conviction of Deonandan Mishra under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code for murder. The judgment was rendered on 28 September 1955 by a three-judge bench consisting of Jagannadhadas, Vivian Bose and Bhuvneshwar P. Sinha. The case was reported in the All India Reporter at page 801 of the 1955 volume and also in the Supreme Court Reporter, second series, page 570. The headnote clarified that the standard of proof required to secure a conviction on circumstantial evidence is well established by a series of Supreme Court decisions. According to that standard, each circumstance relied upon must be fully proved and the chain of evidence must be so complete that it leaves no reasonable ground for a conclusion consistent with the accused’s innocence. The appellant was a stenographer employed by the Inspecting Assistant Commissioner of Income-Tax in Patna and was convicted and sentenced to transportation for life. No eyewitness testimony was produced, and the conviction rested solely on the circumstantial evidence presented before the trial courts. The various facts forming the links in the chain of circumstantial evidence, taken together, advanced the case against the appellant beyond reasonable suspicion and pointed to him as the murderer. In the present case, the Court observed that when the links in the chain are satisfactorily established and the circumstances indicate the accused as the probable assailant with reasonable definiteness concerning time and situation. The Court further held that the accused’s failure to provide any explanation, or the provision of a false explanation, serves as an additional link that completes the evidential chain. The judgment referred to the earlier decision in Hanumant v. State of Madhya Pradesh, reported in 1952 S.C.R. at page 1091, for support of this principle. The appeal arose from Criminal Appeal No. 19 of 1955, filed by special leave against the judgment and order dated 11 May 1954 of the Patna High Court in Death Reference No. 8 of 1954. The same appeal also incorporated Criminal Appeal No. 142 of 1954, which arose from the judgment and order dated 12 March 1954 in Sessions Trial No. 2 of 1954. Counsel for the appellant was B. P. Maheshwari and counsel for the respondent, representing the State, was M. M. Sinha. The Court delivered its judgment on 28 September 1955, with Justice Jagannadhadas authoring the opinion and the other two judges concurring in the reasoning.

In this case, the Court recorded that the deceased, Mst. Parbati Devi, had been married to the appellant around the year 1941 and that she was his second wife. The evidence presented in the trial portrayed her as a woman who was regarded by some members of the community as having loose morals. According to the testimony, she was abandoned by both her husband and her father in or about 1945, after which she sought shelter in the Anath Ashram at Gaya. The Secretary of the Ashram intervened, and with the consent of both her husband and her father she entered into a second marriage with a man identified as Nand Lall of Punjab in December 1945. She remained with Nand Lall for roughly one and a half years, but the record states that she left him on the allegation of ill-treatment. She returned to the Anath Ashram at Gaya in June 1947, only to depart again in October 1947. The evidence does not clarify what happened after that date, and her whereabouts between October 1947 and August 1953 were not known to the investigators and appear to have escaped tracing. The prosecution, however, was able to establish that shortly before the murder she was seen moving about the areas surrounding Gaya. In particular, on the 2nd and 3rd September 1953, that is, two days before her death, she was observed travelling between Gaya and Patna, passing through a place called Chakand that lies between the two towns.

Early on the morning of 4 September 1953, at about seven o’clock, a police havildar (identified as PW 10) discovered the naked dead body of a female lying in the Kabristhan on the outskirts of Gaya, approximately one and a half miles from the police thana. The body was positioned on the western verandah of the Kabristhan bungalow and bore multiple cut injuries on the neck and other parts of the body. The havildar reported the finding to the police, and the body was subsequently identified as that of Parbati Devi, the appellant’s second wife. An investigation followed, leading to the appellant’s arrest on 6 September 1953 and his committal to trial. No eyewitness to the murder was produced; consequently, the case against the appellant rested entirely on circumstantial evidence. The Court noted that the standard of proof required for a conviction on circumstantial evidence has been laid down in a series of decisions, including the authority cited as Hanumant v. The State of Madhya Pradesh. Under that standard, each circumstance relied upon must be fully established, and the chain of evidence must be so complete that it leaves no reasonable ground for a conclusion consistent with the accused’s innocence. Counsel for the appellant vigorously argued before the Court that the circumstances had not been fully proved and, even if they were, were insufficient to bring the offence home to the accused. The Court therefore turned to a detailed examination of the various circumstances disclosed in the record.

It was recorded that the appellant was a resident of Chakanddih, a village situated approximately one and a half miles from Chakand railway station. That station lay on the railway line between Patna and Gaya and was located about five miles from Gaya. The evidence showed that the deceased woman, identified as Parbati Devi, disembarked at Chakand station on the night of 2 September 1953 at around ten to fifteen minutes past ten p.m. She had arrived on a train travelling from Gaya to Patna and, after alighting, proceeded toward the village of Chakanddih. The next morning she is said to have taken a train from Chakand to Patna.

Subsequently, on the morning of 3 September, at about ten o’clock, the deceased presented herself at the Income-Tax Office in Patna. There she made enquiries about the appellant from a peon of the office, identified as PW 12. According to the testimony, the peon informed the appellant that the woman had come to see him. On receiving this information, the appellant went out to meet her, told the peon that she was his wife, and requested that the peon arrange a place for her to stay for the day so that he could meet her in the evening after completing his office work. The peon complied and placed the woman in the quarters of the Chowkidar, PW 22, who lived within the office compound. In the evening of the same day, that is, on 3 September at about seven p.m., the appellant came to the Chowkidar’s quarters and took the woman away in a rickshaw. This sequence of events was narrated by the peon, PW 12, and the Chowkidar, PW 22.

The record further indicated that, after midday on 3 September 1953, the appellant filed an application for casual leave for one day, namely 4 September, and that leave was subsequently granted. The fact that the appellant applied for and obtained leave was not disputed.

The next piece of evidence against the appellant concerned his alleged presence on a train with the deceased on the night of 3 September. Three witnesses – PW 1, a daffadar, and PW 3 and PW 4, two chowkidars, all of whom were on duty at Chakand railway station that night – testified that they saw the appellant travelling with the deceased in a third-class compartment of the train that left Patna at about eight p.m. for Gaya. According to their testimony, the appellant and the deceased were observed in the compartment at approximately eleven or eleven-thirty p.m. when the train briefly stopped at Chakand station. The witnesses stated that they knew both individuals well and that neither of them disembarked at Chakand; instead, they continued on the train toward Gaya. If this testimony were accepted as it had been by the lower courts, it constituted a strong circumstance against the appellant, for it placed him in the company of the deceased a few hours before the time when the murder was believed to have occurred.

In this case, the Court observed that the prosecution’s evidence placed the deceased woman in the appellant’s company only a few hours before the time at which the murder was alleged to have occurred, and that this evidence had been vigorously contested by the appellant. The appellant conceded that the deceased had met him at his Patna office during the first week of September, but he insisted before the Sessions Judge that the meeting had taken place on the 2nd of the month rather than on the 3rd. When questioned under section 342 of the Criminal Procedure Code by the learned Sessions Judge, the appellant admitted that the deceased had come to the Income-Tax Office in Patna to see him, that he had met her there, that he had arranged for her to stay in the house of the chowkidar employed at the office, and that he had taken her from the chowkidar’s lodging in the evening by rickshaw. Nevertheless, he maintained that all of these occurrences had happened on the 2nd and not on the 3rd, adding that after escorting her from the chowkidar’s quarters by rickshaw he had alighted at a crossing, given her some money and sent her away. He further asserted that the woman had previously approached his office to demand money. Both the trial court and the appellate court rejected the appellant’s contention that the meeting occurred on the 2nd. The rejection was based on the testimony of the peon (P.W. 12) and the chowkidar (P.W. 22), whose statements supported the prosecution’s position that the date was the 3rd, and on the evidence of the Income-Tax Inspector, an educated and responsible officer whose personal knowledge corroborated the same date. The Court also noted that when the appellant was examined under section 342 of the Criminal Procedure Code before the Committing Magistrate, he did not expressly assert that the meeting had taken place on the 2nd; instead, his answers were simple denials of having seen Parbati Devi at the Income-Tax Office on the 3rd and of having asked the chowkidar to allow her to remain in his house for the entire day. Consequently, the appellant’s present claim that the encounter occurred on the 2nd appeared to be a later invention. In view of these circumstances, the Court held that the material facts – namely, that the appellant met the deceased at the Patna Income-Tax Office on the 3rd, that he took her that evening from the chowkidar’s quarters by rickshaw, and that he was later seen travelling with her on the night train at approximately eleven or eleven-thirty p.m. at Chakand railway station en route to Gaya – had been fully and clearly established by both lower courts. The Court further identified the next crucial allegation against the appellant as the existence of a strong motive, noting that the relationship between the parties was reported to be completely strained.

In this case the record showed that the marital relationship between the appellant and the deceased had effectively broken down, although no formal divorce had been obtained, and that this deterioration was clearly demonstrated by a Thyagpatra submitted by the appellant to the Secretary of Anath Ashram in 1945, in which he authorized the Ashram to arrange the deceased’s remarriage to another person. The record also confirmed that the appellant had taken a third wife sometime before the murder took place. The prosecution argued that, considering these circumstances together with the adverse reputation that the deceased had acquired, as established by the evidence, and the fact that she had begun to trouble the appellant by visiting his office, the appellant possessed a strong motive to commit the murder. The defence, however, contended that the deceased was likely involved with several other individuals with whom she may have been carrying on romantic relationships, and that her conduct had provoked jealousy among various persons in the vicinity of the places where she had been residing for some time before her death; consequently, any one of those persons might have possessed a stronger motive to perpetrate the crime. While it was acknowledged that the evidence did not clearly establish the deceased’s whereabouts or activities from about October 1947 to August 1953, the material before the court nevertheless indicated a strong motive on the part of the appellant. It had already been established that the deceased left the appellant in 1945 and sought refuge in the Anath Ashram at Gaya. Exhibit 2(a), a Thyagpatra dated 12 October 1945, showed that the appellant purported to relinquish all marital rights over the woman and authorized the Ashram to arrange her marriage according to her own choice. In addition, the appellant sent a letter to the Secretary of the Ashram, reproduced as Exhibit 2-A(1), in which he stated that he had duly completed the Thyagpatra concerning his wife Parbati Devi and submitted it to the Ashram, and he prayed that the Ashram Samiti and the Bibah Samiti should arrange for her marriage in a distant location in another state, because, in his view, she was a woman of loose character whose marriage in a nearby place would bring ill fame to the Ashram and to himself, and that, as a police employee, such a reputation would adversely affect his service. He further requested that his prayer not be refused. The appellant’s state of mind, as revealed in this letter, provided insight into how he might have reacted when, despite being married off far away, the deceased returned and moved repeatedly between Patna and Gaya, eventually coming to his office to demand money, an act that the prosecution said demonstrated a present motive for the murder.

In this matter, the Court observed that the appellant’s earlier letter, dated about eight years before the homicide, merely demonstrated his mindset at that distant time and did not by itself explain the later killing. Nevertheless, the appellant’s own admission that the deceased woman had resumed contacting him at his office, demanding money on at least two occasions, including on 3 September, allowed the lower tribunals to infer a present and strong motive on his part. Counsel for the appellant contended that even if the alleged motive and the testimony that the appellant had been seen travelling by train with the woman on the night of 3 September were accepted, such facts would only raise a serious suspicion and would not, in isolation, establish the appellant’s guilt. He further pointed out the lack of any direct evidence showing that the appellant and the deceased alighted together at Gaya railway station or that they subsequently proceeded towards Kabristhan after disembarking. This observation highlighted a gap in the evidentiary record. Yet the Court noted that any such alighting and movement toward Kabristhan would necessarily have occurred at or after midnight. Kabristhan, the Court explained, lay on the outskirts of Gaya, approximately one and a half miles from the Gaya police station, situated on the bank of the Phalgu River, and was isolated with no habitation within one hundred yards. Consequently, the absence of a specific eyewitness account placing the appellant with the victim near Kabristhan was understandable. The Court added that if the evidence were limited to the earlier points, a degree of hesitation regarding conviction might be justified. However, the Court also indicated that the lower courts had relied on additional circumstances that warranted consideration. First, a blood-stained pen-knife was discovered close to the corpse; second, the appellant sustained certain injuries at the time of his arrest on 6 September. The evidence of Police Witness 23, the officer-in-charge of Kotwali police station, Gaya, who commenced the investigation after receiving information at seven a.m. on 4 September, established that the deceased’s body lay in a pool of blood beneath and near the neck, and that a blood-stained knife was found near the head and subsequently seized as Exhibit 1. The prosecution further called three witnesses—Police Witnesses 11, 13 and 18, identified respectively as the Daftari, the Chaprasi and the Income-Tax Inspector attached to the office in Patna where the appellant was employed—who testified that they had previously observed the appellant in possession of a knife resembling the one presented in Court as having been discovered beside the dead body. During cross-examination, the Income-Tax Inspector (PW 18) stated that he had never before seen such a knife.

In this case, the Court noted that three prosecution witnesses, namely PW 11, PW 12 and PW 13, testified that they had seen the appellant carrying a knife that was similar to the knife later recovered from the side of the deceased’s body. Among those witnesses, PW 18, an Income-Tax Inspector, was cross-examined and declared that he had never before seen a knife of that description. During the appellant’s examination under section 342 of the Criminal Procedure Code, he admitted that he kept a small knife for sharpening a pencil, but he denied that the knife produced in evidence as being recovered from the scene was his knife or that it resembled the knife he kept. The defence strongly urged that no proof had been offered to show that the recovered knife was the very knife previously possessed by the appellant.

The learned judges of the High Court addressed the defence’s criticism by observing: “Of course no witness could have possibly deposed that this was the knife which was in possession of the appellant. They say that the knife which they had seen with the appellant prior to the occurrence was a knife similar to the one which was found in a blood-stained condition near the dead body. We have examined that knife for ourselves and it has a peculiarity of its own. The knife has an ivory handle. It has a cork screw and a bottle opener—all combined. A knife of this description, therefore, can be identified and it is not one of the kind which can be said to be an ordinary one.” The judges further explained that it was impossible for any witness to positively identify the recovered instrument as the one that had been in the appellant’s possession at the relevant time. They pointed out that the witnesses had described the knife they had seen with the appellant before the incident as being “similar to” the knife found near the corpse. In addition, the judges had examined the recovered knife personally and noted its distinctive ivory handle, combined cork-screw and bottle-opener, features that made it uniquely identifiable. Considering this observation together with the testimony of PW 18, who, although he did not comment on those distinctive features, unequivocally stated that he had never before seen such a knife, the Court found no reason to disagree with the High Court’s conclusion that the recovery of this particular knife near the dead body constituted a strong circumstance against the appellant.

The next circumstance relied upon against the appellant was the presence of injuries on his body at the time of his arrest on 6 September. PW 24, a Civil Assistant Surgeon at Gaya, examined the appellant at six o’clock in the evening on that date and recorded four simple injuries: (i) a wound on the left ring finger, (ii) a wound on the dorsum of the left hand near the thumb, (iii) two abrasions on the anterior surface of the right knee, and (iv) a small abrasion on the anterior surface of the left knee. The surgeon opined that all the injuries were approximately three days old. He suggested that injuries (i) and (ii) could have been inflicted by a sharp-edged instrument such as a pen-knife, while injuries (iii) and (iv) might have resulted from contact with a hard, rough surface such as friction against the ground. According to his assessment, the nature and location of the injuries were consistent with a scenario in which, if the victim lay on the ground and the assailant was positioned over the victim’s chest, the assailant could be holding the victim with his left hand; in such a circumstance, the injuries to the appellant’s left hand could have been caused by the appellant’s own weapon, and the injuries to the knees could have been produced by friction with the ground.

The Court noted that the medical officer’s description suggested that if the assailant were applying pressure with his left hand while the victim struggled, the assailant might become unsteady and consequently the first two injuries could have been caused by the assailant’s own weapon, whereas the third and fourth injuries could have resulted from friction with the ground. This observation opened the possibility that the injuries could have been sustained by a person who was attacking the victim with a pen-knife. When the appellant was questioned under section 342 of the Criminal Procedure Code regarding these injuries, he asserted before both the Sessions Court and the committal court that he had fallen on the platform at Jehanabad on the 3rd of September because his dhoti became entangled, and that this fall had produced the injuries. To support this version, the appellant relied on an application for an extension of leave that he sent by telegram on the morning of 5 September to the Commissioner of Income-Tax, Patna, followed by a letter of the same date addressed to the Inspecting Assistant Commissioner of Income-Tax, Northern Range, Patna. The letter read in the appellant’s own words: “I beg to state that I started from home from Patna in the night train of 3rd September 1953. When the train stopped at Jehanabad I wanted to come out of the train for taking a stand on the platform due to unbearable heat in the train. At the gate of the compartment as soon as I wanted to come out my one leg entangled with the lower part of my dhoti resulting instantaneous fell down from the train. Due to this accident I got injuries at both the knees and the cut marks in the back of my left palm. I therefore request you to kindly extend my leave up to 10th September, ‘53.” When interrogated under section 342 before the Sessions Court about the reason for seeking the leave extension, the appellant replied that he was a stenographer and could not type with his left hand injured, hence the request for additional leave. The Court found this explanation doubtful, given the nature of the injuries and the absence of any explicit reference to the alleged injury in the leave application. Moreover, the medical evidence did not convincingly show how injuries numbered one and two could have arisen from the purported fall on the railway platform. During cross-examination, counsel suggested that a broken piece of glass on the ground might have caused such wounds if the hand struck it violently during a fall, but the appellant’s statements and his leave application contained no indication that a glass fragment was involved. In view of these considerations, the Court concluded that the lower courts were justified in rejecting the appellant’s explanation for the injuries.

In this case, the Court observed that the lower tribunals had concluded that the appellant’s account of his injuries was untrue and that those injuries could plausibly have been sustained during the commission of the murder. The Court then summarized the material facts that formed the chain of circumstantial evidence. First, the appellant possessed a fairly strong motive to kill the woman who was later found dead. Second, on the evening of 3 September, he took charge of the woman by removing her from the quarters of the chowkidar of the Incometax Office in Patna and placed her in a rickshaw while leaving the premises with her. Third, he was later seen travelling with the woman on a train bound for Gaya; the train stopped at Chakand railway station at about eleven or eleven-thirty p.m., which was a few hours before the time at which the murder is believed to have occurred. Fourth, a knife resembling the one the appellant was known to use in his office and not of a common pattern was discovered beside the head of the deceased, stained with blood. Fifth, when the appellant was apprehended two and a half days after the murder, he bore simple injuries on his hand and his knees, injuries that, according to medical evidence, could have been inflicted during an assault on the woman with the aforementioned knife. Taken together, these circumstances advanced the case against the appellant well beyond mere suspicion and, in the Court’s view, pointed reasonably and definitely to him as the person who committed the murder. In this context, the appellant offered no explanation as to where, how, or when he left the woman after having taken her in Patna on the evening of the 3rd and after travelling together on the night train toward Gaya, a silence that weighed heavily against him. Moreover, he attempted to dissociate himself from the woman at the relevant time by first presenting, in the Sessions Court, a story that he had met her in Patna on 2 September and that he had part-ed company with her that evening at a crossing after giving her some money, a narrative that the Court found patently false. The additional finding that his explanation for his own injuries also appeared false was regarded as significant. These false explanations constituted telling circumstances which, when considered with the other circumstantial facts, were sufficient to bring the guilt home to the accused. To challenge this conclusion, counsel for the appellant called attention to the nature and position of the injuries on the deceased woman’s body as disclosed by the medical evidence of Doctor PW 17.

In this case, the Court noted that the post-mortem examination had been carried out and that various indications at the site of the occurrence had been recorded, as reported by the police officer identified as P.W. 23. Officer P.W. 23 was the first police officer to arrive at the scene at approximately seven in the morning on the fourth day after receiving information about the incident. The Court also observed that the report of the Serologist and Chemical Examiner disclosed that no human blood was found on the saree and the bodice that lay near the place where the dead body had been discovered, and that neither the saree nor the bodice showed any sign of being torn or tampered with. In contrast, the body itself had been found completely naked, lying face upwards. These facts had been presented to support a strong argument that the murder might have involved more than one person and could have arisen from sexual jealousy. The Court stated that it had examined this aspect of the matter very closely and carefully scrutinised the entire evidence, and it found it unnecessary to repeat that analysis. Whatever the actual situation at the spot or the method by which the murder was carried out—matters that would remain speculative—the Court was satisfied that the murder could have been committed by a single individual, namely the appellant. While hearing an appeal by special leave, the Court affirmed that it was not prepared to conclude that the medical evidence and other accompanying circumstances compelled a finding contrary to that reached by the lower courts. The Court acknowledged that, in cases relying on circumstantial evidence, each link in the chain must be clearly established and the completed chain must eliminate any reasonable possibility of the accused’s innocence. In the present case, the Court observed that the links had been satisfactorily established and that the circumstances pointed to the appellant as the probable assailant with reasonable definiteness and proximity to the deceased in terms of time and situation. The appellant offered no explanation for the circumstances, and even a hypothetical explanation, if accepted, though not proven, would not provide a reasonable basis for concluding his innocence. Consequently, the absence of an explanation, or the presence of a false explanation, itself formed an additional link that completed the chain of evidence. The Court therefore held that the case satisfied the standards required for conviction on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Accordingly, the Court found no sufficient reason to depart from the view of the lower courts and dismissed the appeal.