The uncle who lost a boy appealed an acquittal himself. The chain had two links missing and a gap nobody could fill
A victim’s appeal under Section 413 BNSS against a Juvenile Justice Board’s acquittal, and a reminder from the Gujarat High Court that a possible view cannot be overturned merely because another was available.
A victim’s right to appeal an acquittal, now in Section 413 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, is one of the more significant additions to Indian criminal procedure in recent years. It gives the person most affected a remedy that used to belong only to the State.
What it does not do is lower the threshold for interfering with an acquittal, and on 24 September 2026 a Bench of Justice Ilesh J. Vora and Justice R.T. Vachhani, in a judgment by Justice Vachhani, had to explain that to a family that had waited eight years.
A boy who did not come home
On 12 December 2017 the complainant lodged a report at Thasra Police Station, District Kheda, that his nephew had gone missing in suspicious circumstances and was later found dead. On the account given, the boy had gone to a local shop on the morning of 10 December and returned home for lunch.
The case against a juvenile came before the Principal Magistrate, Juvenile Justice Board, Nadiad in Juvenile Criminal Case No. 36 of 2018, for offences under Sections 302 and 201 of the Indian Penal Code — murder, and causing the disappearance of evidence.
By a judgment of 28 February 2025 the Board acquitted him. The victim’s side appealed under Section 413 BNSS read with Section 101 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015. Mr. Jay G. Thaker appeared for the appellant, with the Public Prosecutor for the State.
Three links, and what the evidence showed
The appellant’s case was that this was a case of circumstantial evidence and that the prosecution had completed the chain connecting the juvenile to the offence. The Court agreed with the framework and disagreed about whether it had been satisfied.
In a case of this kind, the Bench held, the prosecution must establish mainly three links: motive, last seen, and recovery.
Working through the evidence of the five main witnesses, it found each link wanting. One witness who was expected to support the prosecution was declared hostile, and what he admitted after that did not carry the case. The evidence of most of the witnesses was hearsay. None of them stated in clear terms the matters the prosecution needed from them, and their evidence did not inspire confidence.
On the last-seen circumstance — normally the strongest link available where there is no eyewitness — the Court found that the evidence did not establish it, and that even on the version advanced there was an unexplained gap between the time the juvenile was said to have been last seen with the deceased and the time the body was found. A last-seen circumstance loses its force as that interval widens, because the wider it is, the more room there is for someone else to have intervened.
On motive, none of the witnesses spoke of any previous enmity or reason for the juvenile to have committed the offence.
And no direct evidence linking the juvenile to the crime surfaced from the evidence, including from the witness who had deposed to having seen something.
The standard for reversing an acquittal
Having reached that conclusion on the facts, the Court set out the settled limits on its own power, and it is the clearest statement in the judgment.
An appellate court hearing an appeal against acquittal must reappreciate the evidence and then consider whether the view taken by the trial court is a possible view on the evidence on record. If it is, the appellate court cannot overturn the acquittal on the ground that another view was also possible. It may interfere only if it finds that the only conclusion available on the evidence was that the guilt of the accused was proved beyond reasonable doubt, and that no other conclusion was possible.
Where a finding is clearly unreasonable, that is a compelling reason for interference — but the test is unreasonableness, not disagreement.
That standard is why an acquittal is harder to reverse than a conviction. A convicted person appeals against a finding that the evidence excluded every reasonable doubt; an appellant against acquittal must show that the evidence excluded every reasonable doubt and that the court below could not honestly have thought otherwise.
The order
In light of that legal position, and for the reasons recorded, and given that the prosecution case did not get support from the evidence recorded by the Juvenile Justice Board, the appeal was dismissed and the judgment and order of acquittal confirmed.
The judgment is worth noting for practitioners chiefly for the procedural route. An appeal by a victim against an acquittal by a Juvenile Justice Board lies to the High Court, under Section 413 of the BNSS read with Section 101 of the 2015 Act, and a Division Bench heard it as it would any appeal against acquittal — reappreciating the evidence in full before applying the possible-view test.
The outcome, for the family, is the harder thing the judgment does not soften. A boy died, an investigation produced hearsay and a hostile witness, and eight years later two courts have found that nobody proved who was responsible. The rule the Court applied is not a comment on whether the juvenile did it. It is a statement about what a court may do when the evidence leaves the question open.