Right to a lawyer, retracted confession: What SC said in judgment on 1996 Samleti bus blast case

The case stems from an explosion inside a Rajasthan Roadways bus travelling from Agra to Bikaner in May 1996 near Samleti in Rajasthan’s Dausa district, which claimed 14 lives and left 37 injured.

Lack of legal representation

For Dr Abdul Hameed, sentenced to face the death penalty in the case, the Supreme Court’s directive means he will face a trial for the third time. During his original trial — which resulted in his conviction in 2014 — he was forced to cross-examine witnesses himself because he did not have a lawyer nor was provided one by the court. Recognising this flaw, the Rajasthan High Court had in April 2015 remanded his case back to the trial court, only to pass a fresh order on his sentence. The trial court had in December 2015 sentenced him to death again.

The Supreme Court noted that the absence of legal representation had plagued the entire trial and was not limited to the sentencing phase. It said that the right to be defended by a lawyer “is not an empty ritual or a mere procedural embellishment, rather, it is a substantive safeguard that lies at the heart of a fair criminal justice system”. Leaving an accused undefended in proceedings carrying grave penal consequences means “the fairness of the trial itself may stand seriously compromised”, the court noted.

Owing to the flawed trial, the court had to decide whether to acquit Hameed or order a fresh trial. The bench chose the latter, in order to balance the rights of the accused with “the nature and gravity of the offence, its impact on society and the larger interests of justice”. Acquitting Hameed solely on the ground of denied legal representation, the court noted, “would neither advance the cause of justice nor appropriately balance the competing interests involved”. The court held that while a fresh trial is “an exceptional course”, it becomes “indispensable where a constitutional infirmity is so fundamental that the conviction cannot be sustained” yet “the interests of justice require that the prosecution to be carried to its logical conclusion”.

The bench directed the setting up of a special court in Jaipur to conduct the trial expeditiously, preferably within a year.

Inadmissible confession

While Hameed’s case hinged on procedural fairness, the case against another convict, Pappu alias Salim, was invalidated by the Supreme Court due to the weakness of the evidence against him. Salim had been sentenced to life imprisonment primarily on the basis of his own confessional statements.

The bench found that Salim had been subjected to multiple recordings of confessions over a protracted period. He gave his first confessional statement before a magistrate in September 1997 in connection with a separate blast case at Jaipur’s Sawai Man Singh Stadium. Five years later, in October 2002, a second confessional statement was recorded in the Samleti bus blast case.

Following concerns by the trial court regarding procedural lapses in the statement, a fresh statement was recorded for a third time in January 2011. Finally, when produced before the trial court as an approver — an accused who turns a state’s witness in exchange for a pardon — in February 2011, Salim disowned his earlier statements, claiming they were made under pressure.

The Supreme Court noted that this “unusual and protracted course of recording confessional statements is wholly inconsistent with the safeguards ordinarily governing the recording of voluntary confessions”. In criminal law, a retracted confession is considered a weak piece of evidence. The court emphasised that a retracted confession, “particularly one whose voluntariness is seriously questioned and whose authenticity is rendered doubtful by repeated recording and subsequent repudiation, cannot constitute the foundation of a conviction unless it receives strong and independent corroboration from reliable evidence”.

In Salim’s case, the court found a complete absence of any independent corroboration. The police had not recovered any explosives, weapons, or incriminating documents from his possession. “Once the very foundation of that evidence stands discredited, the superstructure sought to be erected upon it must necessarily collapse,” the court ruled, acquitting him of all charges.

No corroboration or discovery

The court also dismissed the State of Rajasthan’s appeal against the High Court’s acquittal in 2019 of six other accused. The prosecution had sought to implicate five of them based on the confessional statement of a co-accused in a separate case. The Supreme Court reiterated the settled legal principle that the confession of a co-accused is not substantive evidence and can only be used to “lend assurance to a conclusion otherwise reached on the basis of independent and legally admissible substantive evidence” which, it found, was absent in the case.

The police had also claimed that two of the acquitted accused persons had pointed out locations, such as a hotel or a bus stand, during the investigation. The court clarified the law regarding such discoveries under the Indian Evidence Act (replaced in 2023 by the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam). For a disclosure statement made in police custody to be admissible, it must lead to the discovery of a new, relevant fact not previously known to the investigating agency.

“The alleged pointing out of certain places, by itself, does not constitute a discovery of an incriminating fact,” the court noted, adding that without the recovery of any incriminating article having a direct nexus with the blast, such statements hold no evidentiary value.