Mohinder Singh vs State Of Punjab

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

Court: Supreme Court of India

Case Number: Not extracted

Decision Date: 13 September, 1955

Coram: Sinha, J.

In the matter of Mohinder Singh versus the State of Punjab, decided on 13 September 1955, the Supreme Court of India recorded a judgment authored by Justice Sinha. The case arose as an appeal by special leave from the judgment of the High Court of Judicature for the State of Punjab at Simla, which had convicted the appellant, Mohinder Singh, then aged twenty-five years, under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code and had sentenced him to death. The appellant had been tried together with his sister’s son, Baj Singh, for the murder of Kapur Singh. Both individuals were found guilty of the offence; Mohinder Singh received the death sentence while Baj Singh was sentenced to transportation for life. Upon further appeal, the High Court set aside the conviction of Baj Singh, granting him acquittal on the ground of the benefit of doubt.

The factual background of the case may be briefly outlined as follows. In the early hours of 29 May 1954, at approximately two-thirty a.m., a first information report was lodged by Sunder Singh, who served as the lambardar of the village of Chirewan, at the police station in Muktsar, located in the district of Ferozepore. The report stated that Phula Singh, identified as the first police witness, was a displaced person originally from the district of Lahore. He had been settled in the village of Chirewan on an allotted plot of sixteen standard acres. Phula Singh had three sons and a daughter; the daughter was married to the appellant, Mohinder Singh. Mohinder Singh himself was also a displaced person from West Punjab and had been residing with his father-in-law Phula Singh for the preceding three years, together with his wife and children. Of Phula Singh’s three sons, the eldest was Kapur Singh, who was reported to be about forty-five years of age. Both Kapur Singh and Mohinder Singh jointly cultivated the land that had been allotted to Phula Singh.

The report further disclosed that Mohinder Singh had developed a liaison with the wife of Kapur Singh, a woman named Har Kaur. A few months before the occurrence, Kapur Singh became aware of this illicit relationship and, about ten days prior to the incident, removed his wife to her father’s residence. Baj Singh, the appellant’s sister’s son, had come to stay with the family only a few weeks before the occurrence. The alleged crime took place on the night between 28 May and 29 May 1954, in the courtyard of Phula Singh’s house. At the time of the police’s early-morning visit on 29 May, three cots that were more or less contiguous to one another were found lying at the scene. The first information report recorded that the three cots had been occupied by the appellant Mohinder Singh and Baj Singh side by side, and by Phula Singh himself. At approximately midnight, Phula Singh was said to have been awakened by the screams of Kapur Singh, who was being killed. Phula Singh claimed that he identified the two accused, Mohinder Singh and Baj Singh, as the assailants who inflicted multiple injuries on Kapur Singh, resulting in his death at that moment.

According to the evidence, the assault was carried out with sharp cutting weapons, specifically kirpans. When the police arrived to investigate the scene, they discovered a blood-stained kirpan near the dead body of Kapur Singh; the weapon was said to have belonged to Baj Singh. It was further alleged that Mohinder Singh escaped from the scene carrying his own kirpan. The two alleged assailants are reported to have shouted at Phula Singh, who was about to intervene, warning him to stay out of their way or else he would suffer the same fate as the victim. In addition to the kirpan, a pair of shoes and several articles of clothing, claimed to be the property of the accused Baj Singh, were found close to one of the three cots situated in the courtyard. Following the alarm raised by Phula Singh, several individuals arrived at the location, including Teja Singh (identified as PW 4) and Arjan Singh (identified as PW 5), as well as Thakar Singh, who was not examined. These persons also asserted that they had identified the two accused while fleeing from the place where the incident occurred. This collection of facts formed the basis of the prosecution case that was investigated by the police, leading to the necessary commitment proceedings and the subsequent placement of the two accused on trial.

The defence put forward an alibi, claiming that on 28 May 1954 the accused Mohinder Singh had left his father-in-law’s village, where the murder took place, and travelled to the village of Beriwala, located about seventy miles away. On the same day, his sister’s son, the second accused, allegedly accompanied Mohinder Singh’s family to the same destination. To support this version of events, three witnesses were examined on behalf of the accused. During the trial, the learned trial judge observed that Phula Singh (PW 1) suffered from a developed cataract that severely weakened his eyesight, to the extent that he could not discern the fingers of a hand at a distance of two to three feet and could only form a vague impression of objects that were close by. Phula Singh maintained that his vision was not as impaired at the time of the occurrence. To ascertain the truth of this claim, the court called the Civil Surgeon of Ferozepore as a witness. The surgeon examined Phula Singh and diagnosed him with senile maturing cataract in both eyes, but he could not state whether Phula Singh’s vision three and a half months earlier, on the date of the incident, might have been better. Despite the medical opinion, the trial judge found no difficulty in accepting Phula Singh’s testimony in its entirety, noting that as the father-in-law of Mohinder Singh, he would have little motive to fabricate a murder case, especially after having already lost his eldest son as a result of the alleged crime. The judge also accepted the testimonies of PW 4 and PW 5, who had responded to Phula Singh’s alarm and identified the accused.

In this case, the Court observed that the prosecution presented witnesses who had responded to the alarm raised by Phula Singh and who had found him in tears, declaring that the two accused had killed his son with kirpans. The third individual, Thakur Singh, who was also said to have arrived at the scene and to have seen the accused fleeing immediately after the incident, was not examined because the Public Prosecutor informed the Court that he would not call Thakur Singh or Har Kaur, the widow of the murdered person, on the ground that they had allegedly been won over by the accused. Witnesses identified as PW 4 and PW 5 testified that they saw accused Mohinder Singh running away while holding a kirpan, whereas accused Baj Singh was running without any weapon. It was important to note that the night in question was very dark, being three days before the new moon, yet these two witnesses maintained that, even in the dead of night, they consistently observed Mohinder Singh with a kirpan in his hand and Baj Singh empty-handed while both were escaping. This narrative appeared to be shaped around the suspicion of Phula Singh, who seemed to have convinced himself beyond any doubt that the two accused were responsible for the murder of his son, Kapur Singh. If the testimony of the three witnesses – PW 1, Phula Singh, who claimed to be an eye-witness, and PW 4 and PW 5, who said they saw the accused running away immediately after hearing PW 1’s alarm – is accepted, there is no difficulty in concluding that there is sufficient evidence to secure a conviction against the accused. That was the conclusion reached by the learned trial Judge and the assessors. However, on appeal, the learned Judges of the High Court acquitted Baj Singh, granting him the benefit of doubt on the pivotal issue of whether he had been privy to the plan to murder Kapur Singh or had taken part in the killing. They did not rely on the testimony of PW 1, Phula Singh, that Baj Singh had also struck the deceased with a kirpan, chiefly because of concerns about his poor eyesight. While acquitting Baj Singh, the High Court affirmed the death sentence imposed on the appellant Mohinder Singh. Consequently, the sole question before this Court was whether the case against the appellant had been proved beyond reasonable doubt, especially since the same evidence had not persuaded the High Court to uphold Baj Singh’s conviction and sentence. In the Court’s view, the case against the appellant was not free from doubt for the following reasons. First, PW 1, Phula Singh, the sole eye-witness, also implicated Baj Singh alongside the appellant. Moreover, the blood-stained kirpan found near the deceased’s feet was alleged by him to belong to Baj Singh, while the kirpan of the appellant had not been recovered, leaving it unknown whether it was also blood-stained.

The prosecution claimed that the blood-stained kirpan found near the dead body belonged to Baj Singh. The kirpan of the appellant was not recovered, and it remained unknown whether it had been blood-stained. Material exhibits labelled P-3, P-4 and P-5, which consisted of newly made garments said to belong to Baj Singh, together with material exhibit P-6, a pair of shoes also asserted to be his, were discovered close to one of the three cots at the scene. The trial judge interpreted these items as incriminating circumstances against the accused Baj Singh. In contrast, no comparable incriminating material was identified in relation to the appellant. The appellant produced three village witnesses from Beriwala, the place to which he had moved with his family on 28 May. Those witnesses testified that they saw the appellant in Beriwala between four and five in the afternoon on that date. The Court recognized that this alibi evidence might not be decisive, because the appellant could conceivably have taken a fast conveyance to the nearby railway station and then travelled by train to the village of Chirewan, thereby undermining the certainty of his presence in Beriwala.

The Court also noted that the incident occurred on a dark night, and that the sole eyewitness, Phula Singh, suffered from poor eyesight that would not have allowed him to clearly identify individuals from even a short distance in such conditions. Nevertheless, despite these physical limitations, Phula Singh was convinced from the outset that the appellant, assisted by his sister’s son Baj Singh, had committed the murder. Consequently, the first information report, prepared within a few hours of the incident, specifically recorded the alleged participation of the two accused, and Phula Singh informed the persons who arrived shortly after the event that those two men were the perpetrators. Other witnesses who came forward, including witnesses identified as PW-4 and PW-5, found no reason to contradict Phula Singh’s inference that only the two accused were responsible, and they testified with confidence that they had observed the relevant facts. The Court observed that the surrounding circumstances created a moral certainty that evolved into factual certainty in the minds of the prosecution witnesses that the two accused were involved in the murder. The Court further remarked that it would be difficult to account for the forceful manner in which the witnesses, particularly PW-1, asserted that the two accused were the true assailants. Finally, the Court acknowledged that the High Court’s decision to give Baj Singh the benefit of doubt introduced a reasonable doubt regarding the appellant’s guilt, and that the positive evidence against the appellant was neither stronger nor substantially different from the evidence presented against Baj Singh.

The prosecution argued that its case relied on the authority of this Court’s decision in Dalip Singh v. State of Punjab, particularly the observations on pages three hundred sixty-seven to three hundred sixty-eight, which stated that the High Court might have been in error in granting Baj Singh the benefit of the doubt and that such an alleged error should not be considered favorable to the appellant before this Court. The Court noted that those observations were drawn in the context of the facts and circumstances revealed by the evidence in that earlier case and therefore could not be treated as a universal rule applicable to all matters. In the present case, the Court found that the evidence of the three witnesses on which the prosecution’s case against the appellant depended was not free from a defect, because the witnesses appeared to be more emphatic in their assertions than the surrounding circumstances justified. The witnesses had been abruptly awakened from a sound sleep by an alarm: the first witness, P. W. 1, was roused by the dying victim, while the other two witnesses were awakened by the disturbance caused by P. W. 1 himself. When they were suddenly roused in the early part of a dark night without any prior apprehension, it would have been difficult for them to notice clearly what they later claimed to have observed. As already indicated, the witnesses seem to have convinced themselves, however honestly, that the two accused were the persons involved in the crime, even though they had not clearly seen them or been able to see them. Moreover, the first prosecution witness, whose testimony forms the basis of the theory on which the prosecution case rests, had eyesight that was too dim to enable a clear view in the darkness, yet he asserted that he saw the two accused delivering the fatal blows. If the basic evidence of P. W. 1 is subject to reasonable doubt regarding its correctness, as the Court believes, there is no difficulty in viewing the testimonies of P. W. 4 and P. W. 5 with the same doubt. In these circumstances the Court was not satisfied that the prosecution evidence had proved the charge against the appellant beyond reasonable doubt. Accordingly, the appeal was allowed, the orders of conviction and sentence were set aside, and the appellant was directed to be released forthwith.