Retracted Confession Contradicted by Medical Evidence Cannot Alone Sustain Conviction: Supreme Court

The appellant and a co-accused were convicted under Sections 365 and 302 IPC for abducting two minor boys, allegedly for ransom, and killing them on 28 June 1999; the Sessions Judge, Dhemaji, sentenced them to death and the High Court confirmed it (para 1). Only the appellant appealed; the co-accused had absconded (para 1). Both had made confessions before the Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate under Section 164 CrPC, which they later retracted, alleging torture and tutoring by the police (paras 3-5). The High Court relied on seven circumstances, including last-seen evidence, recoveries, the confessions and an extra-judicial confession made while recreating the scene (para 6).

The last-seen evidence, the recoveries and the absconding related only to the co-accused (paras 8-12). The alleged extra-judicial confession during the scene recreation was discarded: the Executive Magistrate's record was not produced, the witnesses stood at a distance and contradicted each other, and police took part in the questioning (paras 13-16). The Section 164 safeguards were complied with, but the court must still examine voluntariness, and under Pyare Lal "a stringent rule of proof as to the existence of threat, duress or inducement should not be applied" (para 18). Its truth must then be tested; as a rule of prudence a retracted confession needs only broad, general corroboration, unlike an accomplice's evidence (paras 19-23). Chandrakant Chimanlal Desai, which applied the co-accused rule in Kashmira Singh to a retracted confession, "falls close to the category of decisions rendered per incuriam" (paras 24-27). Here nothing corroborated the confession, and its account of strangulation conflicted with the post-mortem finding of a head injury (para 28). The High Court also failed to consider the appellant's case separately (para 29).