Two severed hands, eight altered records, and a death sentence that cannot stand

Justices Atul Sreedharan and Achal Sachdev answer a capital reference in the negative and commute two death sentences to life — then order the Director General of Police to inquire into the officers who prepared the inquests, with a report to the Registrar General within three months.

A quarrel between neighbours over a field boundary and a row of poplar trees ended, on a November evening in 2011, with two men hacked to death and the hands of both severed. A Sessions Judge in Muzaffarnagar sentenced a father and son to death in 2017 and referred the sentences for confirmation. On 9 October 2026 a Division Bench of the Allahabad High Court declined to confirm them. The convictions stand and the sentences become life imprisonment — but the judgment's longer reach is in its last pages, where the Bench sets out eight specific defects in the official record of a double murder and directs the Director General of Police to find out who made them.

A ridge, some poplar trees, and an evening in November

The informant's land adjoined the first appellant's. The informant's poplar trees stood on the ridge between the two fields, and the prosecution case was that his neighbour wanted to cut the ridge and take the trees into his own holding. On the morning of 9 November 2011, it was alleged, the neighbour and his sons threatened to kill the informant's family if they cut the trees.

That evening at about five o'clock the informant was in the field with his father, his elder son, his younger son and a nephew. Four accused arrived carrying a balkati, a ballam, a bhala and a sword, abused them near the poplar trees and attacked. The informant's elder son was killed on the spot and his hand severed. The informant's father was hacked, his hand also severed, and he died on the way to hospital. Two others were injured, one of them a boy of about fifteen or sixteen; another was referred to Meerut because his condition was serious. The informant himself was chased to his house and escaped.

The FIR was registered under Sections 302 and 307 of the Penal Code, its time of registration recorded as 17:30 hours. Four men were arrested two days later, weapons said to have been recovered at their pointing out, and a separate Arms Act case registered on one of the recoveries. Two of the four were found to be juveniles, their cases separated and sent to the Juvenile Justice Board; the Bench was careful to record that it refers to their role only because it forms part of the evidence against the appellants, and that nothing in the judgment is a finding of their guilt.

By judgment of 23 May 2017 the Sessions Judge convicted the remaining two under Section 302 read with Section 34 and sentenced them to death, convicted them under Section 307 read with Section 34 with ten years' rigorous imprisonment each, and sentenced them under the Arms Act. The reference under Section 366 of the Code and the appeal against conviction were heard together.

What a death reference requires

The Bench began by stating its own task, and it is worth quoting because it is often treated as a formality. In a death reference this Court must examine the whole evidence for itself and reach its own conclusion on guilt and sentence, regardless of the trial court's view — the rule from Jumman v. State of Punjab, AIR 1957 SC 469. The appeal against conviction requires a reassessment of the evidence in any event. “We have reviewed the entire record.”

On guilt, the reassessment held. The informant's own account was not believed — the morning threat rested on him alone, the injured witnesses did not speak of it, and he admitted there had been no earlier quarrel over the ridge or the trees. But the injured witnesses and the medical evidence were accepted, and the convictions under Sections 302/34 and 307/34 were upheld. The Arms Act conviction was set aside and the appellants acquitted of that charge.

Why the death sentence could not stand

The sentencing section opens without euphemism. “The offence is serious. Two people, one of them a young student, were killed, and two others, one a boy of about fifteen or sixteen, were injured, in an attack with sharp weapons on unarmed people who were fleeing. The hands of both the deceased were cut off by the accused.”

The question, on Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab and Machhi Singh v. State of Punjab, is whether this is one of the rarest of rare cases in which the option of life imprisonment is unquestionably foreclosed; and on Manoj v. State of M.P., (2023) 2 SCC 353, the sentence must suit the individual offender, taking into account the chance of reform on material about each accused.

Four reasons ruled out death. First, on the evidence the attack was “the violent outcome of a quarrel over land between neighbours”, not a killing for gain, not the killing of a helpless person for its own sake, and not a crime directed at society at large; the alleged advance plan was not proved, and that the attackers came armed showed readiness for violence but not a calculated plan to kill. The families were already at odds over land, with a civil suit pending for cancellation of a sale deed. Second, the convictions rest on Section 34, and the evidence does not show which attacker inflicted the fatal injuries or severed the hands — “It would not be safe to impose the death penalty based on joint liability alone.” Third, the FIR was ante-dated and the investigation flawed; those defects did not justify rejecting the injured witnesses, but they left residual doubt, which is itself a mitigating factor on Ashok Debbarma v. State of Tripura, (2014) 4 SCC 747. Fourth, nothing on record indicated that the appellants could not be reformed or posed a continuing danger; no criminal record was alleged against either, and they had been in custody since 2011.

The hearing that never happened

There was also a defect in how the sentence was arrived at, and the Bench treated it as independently fatal.

The trial court called for no report on mitigating circumstances — nothing on antecedents, social background, mental health or conduct in jail — and the accused were not told they could place such material before the court. “The hearing on sentence under Section 235(2) of the Cr.P.C. must be a real hearing, not a formality, in which the accused has a fair opportunity to show what bears on sentence.” A death sentence cannot be passed without assessing, on material, the offender's circumstances and whether he can be reformed, on Santosh Kumar Satishbhushan Bariyar v. State of Maharashtra, (2009) 6 SCC 498, as further explained in Manoj. “Here, the death sentence was passed without considering any mitigating circumstances, and it cannot stand for that reason alone.”

Ordinarily such a defect would mean remitting the matter or calling for the reports on appeal. That was unnecessary here, because on the reasons already given this was not a case in which life imprisonment was ruled out.

Eight things wrong with the record

Then the Bench turned to the papers, and the list is the part of this judgment that will be cited.

In both inquest reports the time of the FIR was first written as 17:00 hours and later altered to 17:30, with no initials and no explanation; the first four lines of one inquest are in a different hand. That same inquest records that information of the death was received at 17:00 hours — when, on the prosecution's own case, the attack was still going on and the man was alive. It records being held between 19:00 and 20:00 hours, although the Investigating Officer said he learnt of the death only at about 7.30 p.m. and reached the postmortem house at about 10 p.m.; and the Sub-Inspector said to have prepared it never signed it. A form attached to it records receipt of the sealed body at police headquarters at 17:00 hours, over the signature of the Reserve Inspector, with no explanation offered.

In the other inquest, the place where the body lay was first written as one man's field and later changed to the other's, without attestation. The weapon recoveries were shown without any disclosure statement, without any public witness and without the time recorded; the departure and arrival entries in the general diary were not produced; and the two police witnesses gave different accounts of the time and place of arrest and of whether the accused signed the sealed packets. The Section 161 statement of one injured witness, recorded a fortnight after the incident, attributes to each accused exactly the weapon later shown as recovered from him — which that witness denied saying. And a memo of seizure of clothes is unsigned by the person concerned, does not name the witnesses before whom the clothes were taken, and has their parentage added later.

“These are not clerical slips.” Taken together, the Bench held, they show that entries in official records were made or altered after the event to fit the prosecution case — or, in the alternative, to cast aspersions on it. And the observation that follows refuses to treat this as a problem for one side only: “Such conduct harms both sides. It exposes the accused to the risk of conviction on false records, and it puts at risk the conviction of the guilty, which is what the victims' families are entitled to expect.” The officers concerned had not been heard, and nothing said was a final finding against any of them.

Order and directions

The capital sentence reference was answered in the negative and the death sentences not confirmed. The appeal was partly allowed: the convictions under Sections 302/34 and 307/34 upheld, the death sentence commuted to life imprisonment with the fine and default sentence unchanged, the ten-year sentences maintained, the Arms Act conviction and sentence set aside, all sentences to run concurrently and the period already served to count.

Six directions follow. A copy of the judgment goes to the Director General of Police, Uttar Pradesh and to the Senior Superintendent of Police, Muzaffarnagar. The Director General is to have an inquiry held by an officer not below the rank of Superintendent of Police, posted outside Muzaffarnagar, into the conduct of the Investigating Officer, two named Sub-Inspectors and any other officer responsible for preparing or altering the records. The inquiry officer is to examine the original case diary, general diary, inquest papers, recovery memos and malkhana register, and to give each officer a hearing. If misconduct is found, strict action is to follow, including departmental proceedings and, where an offence is disclosed, criminal proceedings. A report of the inquiry and the action taken is to be placed before the Registrar General of the High Court within three months. And the Director General is to consider issuing instructions to all districts to ensure that the time of receipt of information, the time of registration of the FIR and the time of the inquest are recorded correctly and contemporaneously, and that any correction is properly explained.

Fifteen years after the evening in the field, two men move from the condemned cell to a life sentence, and the papers that nearly hanged them are going to be examined by somebody from another district.