In this 2008 ruling the Supreme Court upheld an NDPS conviction resting on the accused's own statement under Section 67, holding that such a statement to an empowered officer can be used as a confession against its maker and is outside Sections 24 to 27 of the Evidence Act (paras 38, 40). Following Raj Kumar Karwal, it treated these officers as not police officers (paras 37-38). The ruling was later overruled by a majority of the Supreme Court in Tofan Singh v. State of Tamil Nadu (2020).
The Supreme Court upheld the Bombay High Court's acquittal of a man convicted under the NDPS Act, because the officer who received the secret information never reduced it to writing as Section 42 requires (paras 5, 19, 25). Although a hotel is a public place under Section 43, the Court said a room occupied by a guest may not be, and that the guest "is entitled to his right of privacy" (para 14).
The State challenged the Delhi High Court's use of Section 41 of the NDPS Amendment Act, 2001 to cut a ten-year minimum sentence for 45 kg of poppy straw powder to the period served, since the proviso excludes cases pending in appeal. The Supreme Court did not decide the point. As the respondent had been in custody for about ten years, it disposed of the appeals, directed his release and left the question open (paras 10, 13-14).
The Supreme Court held that provisions 704 and 705 of the Indian Railways Vigilance Manual, 1996, which call for independent witnesses in departmental traps, are "procedural in character and not of a substantive nature" (para 24). Their breach does not by itself vitiate disciplinary proceedings, so the Court allowed the Railway's appeals against orders that had quashed penalties imposed on three ticket examiners (paras 24-26).
The Supreme Court restored the NDPS conviction of a man from whose scooter 700 grams of opium was recovered, holding that Section 42 does not apply when a police officer on patrol stops and searches a vehicle in transit in a public place (paras 2, 7-9). Following Jarnail Singh, such a seizure falls under Section 43, which has no proviso requiring recorded grounds (para 8). "Section 42 has no application to the facts of the case" (para 9).
The Supreme Court set aside a Rajasthan High Court acquittal that rested only on non-compliance with Section 50 of the NDPS Act. Read plainly, the word person in Section 50 does not cover a bag or other article carried by the accused, so Section 50 had no application. As the High Court had not examined the other grounds, the appeal was remitted for a fresh hearing on them (paras 3, 9, 13).
The Supreme Court upheld a man's conviction for murdering his brother on his own voluntary extra-judicial confession and the recovery of the body, but acquitted three co-accused whose conviction rested on a co-accused's retracted judicial confession (paras 70-71, 164). It held that "no judgment of conviction shall be passed on an uncorroborated retracted confession" (para 107), and commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment as the case was not the rarest of rare (paras 157, 162, 164).
The Supreme Court set aside a conviction and death sentence for the rape and murder of a minor girl that rested on a retracted judicial confession (paras 2, 4, 23). Section 164 CrPC must be complied with "in letter and spirit", not mechanically: a confession recorded in fifteen minutes, on oath, without time for reflection or legal aid, after sixteen days in police custody, could not be relied on, and the alleged corroboration formed no chain (paras 10, 16, 19, 21).
The Supreme Court set aside a High Court judgment that had reversed an acquittal for carrying opium on a scooter. Section 50 may not apply to a vehicle search, but because the accused were also searched personally, the officer had to comply with it and did not (para 17). In 2019 a three-Judge Bench in State of Punjab v. Baljinder Singh held this decision ‘not correct’ for extending that benefit to the vehicle recovery.
The Supreme Court restored a charas conviction that the Punjab and Haryana High Court had set aside for non-compliance with Section 50. The 2 kg of charas was found in a plastic bag, and under Pawan Kumar Section 50 applies only to a personal search. The remark in Namdi Francis Nwazor that a handbag search is a search of the person was obiter, not binding (paras 3, 8, 17-18).
The Supreme Court has upheld a man's conviction for possessing opium under the NDPS Act, rejecting the High Court's finding that he had conspired with a co-accused to jointly possess a larger quantity. It held there was no evidence of conspiracy, but independently found the 920 grams recovered from him alone already exceeded the commercial-quantity threshold for an opium derivative.
A three-Judge Bench held that a doctor can be prosecuted under Section 304A IPC only for negligence that is gross or of a very high degree; the Bolam test governs medical negligence in India, and res ipsa loquitur has at most a limited role in a criminal trial (para 45). It laid down guidelines requiring a credible medical opinion before a private complaint or investigation proceeds against a doctor, and quashed the prosecution over an empty oxygen cylinder (paras 49-51).