Vaikuntam Chandrappa And Ors. vs State Of Andhra Pradesh

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

Court: Supreme Court of India

Case Number: Not extracted

Decision Date: 14 August 1959

Coram: A.K. Sarkar, K. Subba Rao, K.N. Wanchoo

In this case, the Court recorded that four appellants together with one other individual had been found guilty by the Sessions Judge of the Anantapur Division for the offence of murder under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code read with Section 34. The conviction had attracted a death sentence, and the accused had also been found guilty of several other offences for which they received a range of punishments. Each of the five convicted persons filed a separate appeal before the High Court of Andhra Pradesh. The High Court allowed one of those appeals but rejected the appeals of the remaining four appellants, thereby confirming their convictions and sentences. The four appellants then obtained special leave to appeal to the Supreme Court against the decision of the High Court.

The prosecution case was briefly summarized by the Court. It stated that in the village of Chippagiri in Anantapur District, long-standing hostility existed between two local factions that were identified for convenience as the Reddy group and the Kamma group. The Reddy group was headed by a man named Virupaksha Reddy, while the Kamma group was led by the accused designated as A-1, A-2 and A-3. Numerous criminal cases had already been filed between members of the two factions, and although the respected social reformer Acharya Vinoba Bhave had made a sincere attempt to reconcile the parties, only a temporary lull was achieved. The atmosphere of rivalry was further inflamed by the impending Panchayat Board elections in the village.

The Court explained that, because of these quarrels, the appellants and four other individuals received information that Virupaksha Reddy would be returning from Isurallapalli, where he had travelled to attend a Bharat Sevak Samaj seminar. Acting on that information, they assembled unlawfully with the common purpose of murdering Reddy. They travelled in a jeep bearing the registration number ADQ 1243, equipped with sickles, spears and daggers. They positioned the vehicle near the Bandrakalva culvert at mile-stone 201/3 on the Gooty-Guntakal Road, forced the vehicle bearing registration number ADQ 273, in which Virupaksha Reddy was travelling, to stop, and then dragged Reddy out of his jeep and slashed him to death in a nearby pit.

The Court noted that the evidence presented against the appellants was both direct and circumstantial. Direct evidence consisted of the statements of three eyewitnesses referred to as P. W. 1, P. W. 2 and P. W. 3. The third witness, P. W. 3, was the driver of the deceased and had previously known all eight alleged assailants. The first two witnesses, P. W. 1 and P. W. 2, were apparently impartial and did not have any prior acquaintance with the accused; an identification parade had been conducted for them. Circumstantial evidence comprised the motive for the attack, observations that the accused were seen together before and after the incident, and proof that they had been present in the jeep ADQ 1243, whose movements before and after the murder had been traced.

The Court recorded that the Sessions Judge had relied mainly on the testimony of the three eyewitnesses. He observed that although the driver (P. W. 3) was present at the scene of the murder and knew the assailants, he was not an impartial witness. Nevertheless, the Judge did not reject the driver’s testimony outright, but he also did not consider it sufficient on its own to sustain the conviction of all eight accused. Consequently, the Judge acquitted three of the accused despite their identification by the driver, reasoning that further corroboration of the driver’s testimony was necessary. He therefore placed primary reliance on the statements of witnesses P. W. 1 and P. W. 2 and on the corroborative value of the circumstantial evidence. As a result, the Sessions Judge affirmed the conviction of the four appellants and the additional accused.

The High Court, according to the record, adopted a similar approach toward the driver’s evidence, accepting it provided that corroboration existed. The High Court identified such corroboration in the statements of the other two eyewitnesses, P. W. 1 and P. W. 2, specifically concerning the four appellants who were the subject of the present appeal. The Court further noted that the High Court had given the benefit of doubt to the fifth accused who had also been convicted, although the remainder of that discussion lay beyond the portion of the judgment reproduced here.

In the trial court, the judge observed that the driver, who was identified as P. W. 3, knew the assailants beforehand and therefore could not be regarded as a disinterested witness. Nevertheless, the judge did not discard the driver’s testimony entirely, but he also chose not to rely on it alone for a conviction of the eight accused. Consequently, the judge acquitted three of the accused even though they had been named by the driver, because he believed that safety required corroboration of the driver’s evidence. To obtain such corroboration, the judge chiefly depended on the testimony of the other two eye-witnesses, P. W. 1 and P. W. 2, together with the circumstantial evidence that linked the accused to the incident. On the basis of this combined proof, the trial court convicted four of the appellants and one additional accused. The High Court adopted the same approach toward the driver’s testimony, agreeing that it could be relied upon only if it was supported by other evidence. The appellate court found corroboration for the four appellants in the statements of P. W. 1 and P. W. 2, while it gave the benefit of doubt to the fifth accused convicted by the trial court because there was no corroboration of the driver’s identification by those two witnesses and the circumstantial material was deemed insufficient. Accordingly, the High Court also required corroboration of the driver’s evidence before confirming any conviction based on his statement.

The appellants argued that the trial judge’s remarks on the driver’s testimony indicated that the judge regarded him as a liar and an unreliable witness, thereby rendering any purported corroboration impossible. While certain observations of the trial judge might be interpreted in that manner, a full consideration of how the trial judge handled the driver’s evidence shows that the appellate court correctly understood the trial judge’s appreciation. Both courts recognized that the driver’s testimony was admissible but that, as a rule of caution, it needed corroboration before it could serve as the sole basis for conviction. The appellate court therefore held that its own view was consistent with the trial judge’s approach, and that requiring corroboration of P. W. 3’s evidence before convicting any of the assailants was proper. The driver’s presence in the jeep at the time of the murder was undisputed, especially since he had sustained a wound during the early phase of the incident, which established his presence beyond doubt.

The Court observed that the driver’s testimony related to the early stage of the incident, but there were reasons to think that he was not completely impartial and might have exaggerated certain aspects. Consequently, the High Court correctly required that his evidence be supported by other eye-witness testimony before any assailant could be convicted. The principal issue presented to the Court by counsel for the appellants was that, even if the matter were examined in the way the High Court had done, there was no corroboration of the driver’s (P. W. 3) evidence concerning two of the accused, namely Vaikuntam Chandrappa (A-3) and Nabi Sab (A-4). The Court first considered the claim with respect to Accused 3. Accused 3 was one of three brothers who headed the Kamma group and had been identified by the driver. The High Court’s reliance for corroboration in his case rested on the statement of P. W. 1, a witness who had no prior acquaintance with any of the alleged assailants. After the arrests, seven of the accused, except Vaikuntam Narayana, were presented to P. W. 1 for identification and were intermingled with thirty-nine other persons. In the identification parade, P. W. 1 correctly selected three of the seven suspects but also incorrectly identified six individuals from the group of thirty-nine. Hence, he made three accurate identifications and six errors. It was argued that, given these circumstances, the identification made by this disinterested witness was unreliable and could not serve as corroboration of the driver’s evidence. If this identification were disregarded, the circumstantial material against Accused 3 would be insufficient to support the driver’s claim that the accused was present at the time of the incident. Therefore, the Court needed to assess whether the identification by this witness could be considered reliable despite his lack of personal interest in the case.

The Court noted that the first striking circumstance was that the witness, while correctly picking out three of the seven suspects, also selected twice as many persons from the larger pool of non-suspects. Moreover, the witness’s initial report had estimated the number of assailants to be about eight or nine. This suggested that the witness was prepared to identify up to nine perpetrators, matching the figure he gave in his first report, without being certain that the individuals he pointed to had actually been seen during the crime. The identification therefore appeared to be driven by a desire to name nine persons rather than by confidence that those persons were truly the perpetrators. In the Court’s view, under such conditions, even a disinterested witness’s identification could not be relied upon. The second circumstance, discussed further in the subsequent portion of the judgment, concerned the statistical likelihood that, in a parade comprising forty-six persons—seven suspects and thirty-nine others—a person who had not actually observed the murder could, by chance, point to one or two of the suspects. Consequently, the Court concluded that the three persons identified by the witness might well have been selected merely by chance, rendering the identification unreliable for corroborating the driver’s testimony.

In the identification parade, a total of forty-six persons were assembled, of whom seven were the actual suspects. The witness selected nine individuals from this group. Statistical reasoning shows that even a person who had not actually observed the murder could, by pure chance, point to one or two of the genuine suspects when asked to choose from such a large assembly. Consequently, it is unavoidable to infer that the three suspects identified by the witness might have been chosen merely by chance. It is acknowledged that, when the witness later testified in court, he again pointed to the same three accused as the persons he had seen at the time of the murder. While the court-room statement constitutes substantive evidence, the purpose of a test identification is precisely to verify such testimony. The established principle requires that a sworn courtroom identification of an accused, who is a stranger to the witness, normally be corroborated by an earlier identification procedure. Exceptions to this rule are possible only when the court is convinced that the particular witness’s evidence is sufficiently reliable to forgo the precaution of a prior identification. In the present case, the court was not prepared to treat P. W. 1 as belonging to that exceptional category. Moreover, once a test identification has been conducted, its impact on the witness’s courtroom evidence must be evaluated. Given the circumstances and the reasons already articulated, the court could not rely on P. W. 1’s courtroom identification.

Accordingly, the identification made by P. W. 1 was held to be inadmissible, even though the witness claimed to be disinterested. The rejection of his identification meant that it could no longer serve as corroboration for the testimony of P. W. 3. As a result, the only evidence remaining against the accused consisted of P. W. 3’s testimony together with the circumstantial material. The court had previously observed that the circumstantial evidence, by itself, did not conclusively establish the presence of the accused at the time of the murder. The High Court had convicted the accused principally on the basis that P. W. 1’s evidence could be used as corroboration. With P. W. 1’s evidence now discarded, no such corroboration existed. Following the principle articulated by the High Court that a conviction should not rest on uncorroborated testimony of P. W. 3, the accused was entitled to the benefit of doubt, just as the fifth person who had been acquitted by the High Court. The discussion then proceeds to the next accused, identified as Nabi Sab (A-4), whose evidence will be examined separately.

The Court examined the testimony of the second witness, identified as P. W. 2, and noted that his statement was intended to corroborate the account of P. W. 3. The witness had never known any of the alleged assailants before the incident. He had participated in an identification parade on the same day as P. W. 1, during which seven suspects were presented together with thirty-nine other individuals. In that parade the witness correctly identified two of the suspects but misidentified one person, and he failed to select the accused in question. At trial the witness asserted that the accused had also been present at the time of the murder and had taken part in it. He explained his earlier failure to recognize the accused by stating that the accused’s facial appearance had changed because he no longer had a moustache. The same explanation was offered for his inability to pick out the accused in the Committing Magistrate’s court. The Court therefore asked whether, under these circumstances, the later identification of the accused in the sessions court could be relied upon as corroboration of P. W. 3’s statement. Although the substantive evidence of P. W. 2 was his trial testimony, the Court found that because the witness had failed to identify the accused both in the earlier identification parade and in the Committing Magistrate’s court, it would be wholly inappropriate to depend on his belated identification in the sessions court. Consequently, the Court rejected the evidence of P. W. 2 as it related to this accused.

With the evidence of P. W. 2 excluded, the only remaining direct evidence against the accused was the testimony of P. W. 3. The Court observed that the circumstantial evidence presented did not rise to the level of certainty required to prove that the accused had been present at the time of the incident. The High Court had previously upheld the conviction on the basis of accepting P. W. 2’s identification, but the present Court held that, following the same reasoning applied to Accused 8, the accused was entitled to the benefit of doubt once P. W. 2’s testimony was discarded. Accordingly, the Court was of the opinion that the accused should be acquitted.

The Court then considered the remaining two appellants, identified as Accused 5 and Accused 7. Both individuals had been named by P. W. 3 and had also been identified by P. W. 2 during the court identification, where the witness’s performance was deemed satisfactory. The Court found that, in these cases, the High Court had correctly concluded that there was sufficient corroboration of P. W. 3’s testimony. Therefore, the appeal of these two accused must fail. In conclusion, the Court allowed the appeal of Vaikuntam Chandrappa and of Nabi Sab, ordering their acquittal, while rejecting the appeals of Kasetti Seenappa and Gaddala Maddanna.