A bench of Justices Sanjay Kumar and K Vinod Chandran dismissed the appeal.

“Overzealous investigation is as fatal to prosecution as are the lethargic and the tardy. Framing a case on public perceptions and personal predilections ends up in a mess, often putting to peril an innocent and always letting free the perpetrator,” the court noted.

Conviction and acquittal

• The case arose from the death of an elderly couple whose house was gutted in a fire.
• The prosecution alleged that their younger son and his wife had set the house ablaze and murdered the parents due to disputes over ancestral property.
• The prosecution relied heavily on alleged dying declarations of one of the victims and the purported motive to secure a conviction.
• A trial court convicted the son and daughter-in-law for the murders. However, the high court later acquitted them, finding the evidence unreliable.

‘Dying declaration important’

• The entire case is founded on motive, the ill-will the son harboured against the father for not having given him his due share in the ancestral property.
• The entire village was against the son and the mishap ended in an investigation where truth was sacrificed at the altar of perceived vengeance, ably assisted by the investigating officer’s selective but careless pursuits, derailing the entire prosecution.
• A dying declaration is a very important species of evidence capable of proving the crime proper and identifying the accused, an exception to hearsay having been provided by Section 32 of the Indian Evidence Act.
• Dying declaration, for reliance should inspire confidence in the Court as to its credibility. That, the court should be satisfied it is made by the deceased without any prompting or tutoring or coercion or is a mere figment of imagination.
• Then conviction can be based solely on the dying declaration and there is no requirement of any corroboration.

‘Sham investigation’

• In the totality of the circumstances as coming out from the evidence, the Supreme Court said it was convinced that the High Court was perfectly correct in acquitting the accused.
• Rather than providing a complete chain of circumstances, with the connecting links establishing the guilt of the accused and bringing forth no hypothesis other than the guilt of the accused, here the circumstances bring out a conscious effort to nail the accused with the crime of arson and premeditated murder.
• The investigation, according to us, was a sham and was premeditated, throwing to the winds every tenet of criminal jurisprudence informed by due procedure.
• We have found that the investigation carried out is grossly deficient. The cause of the fire was not investigated, and the presence of the accused in the vicinity of the crime scene was not established.
• The dying declarations should have been recorded with more caution, and when taken inside the hospital, they should have ideally been recorded in the presence of a Doctor, whose certification also ought to have been obtained.
• The son and daughter-in-law were accused of parricide and were convicted by the trial court, later acquitted by the high court, whose acquittal is now affirmed by us.
• The trauma of arrest, incarceration and trial will always scar the couple and more so their children who were left orphaned during the time when their parents were imprisoned.
• We cannot but caution the investigators and the courts to strive to do better and follow accepted practises and procedural rules to the hilt, when lives are lost or taken and there is a possibility of false accusations being made, putting to peril the reputations of the living.