Four men shot dead in 1996, thirteen convicted in 2023, and every conviction now set aside over the investigation

Justices Rajeev Ranjan Prasad and Kumar Manish allowed five appeals, ordered a three-member police committee on the investigating officer, and asked the Home Department to report in a month.

Four men were shot dead in August 1996 while keeping watch over an irrigation embankment. The trial court convicted thirteen men in 2023, twenty-seven years later. On 13 October 2026 a Division Bench of the Patna High Court set aside every one of those convictions, holding that the prosecution had not proved its case and that the investigation had been conducted negligently. It then turned on the agency that produced the case, directing the Director General of Police to constitute a committee of senior officers to examine how the investigating officer had worked, and calling on the Home Department to explain what it does about such lapses.

The night at the ahar

The prosecution case rests on the fardbeyan of the informant, recorded by the officer in charge of the local outpost at 5 a.m. on 9 August 1996, near the place of occurrence. A large ahar on the north-west side of the informant's village stored water for irrigation, and villagers from a neighbouring village used to cut the embankment, so a group was keeping watch from a hut.

At about 11 p.m. they heard movement. The informant called out, and thirty to forty unknown men in half pants and ganjis, armed with rifles and guns, came up to the hut. One of them said they belonged to a party and told the group to keep quiet. Some went to the western side and some stayed to the east. A lathi was taken from the hut and used on two of the men. From the east a torch was flashed, and the man beside the torch fired. Four men died of firearm injuries and others were injured, including one who gave evidence as an injured witness.

The trial court convicted thirteen accused under Sections 302 and 34, Sections 307 and 34 and Section 148 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 27 of the Arms Act, and acquitted six others on benefit of doubt. The sentences on the Section 307 count were ten years' rigorous imprisonment with a fine, and three years under the Arms Act, running concurrently. Five appeals came to the High Court.

What the record did not have in it

The defence case was built on gaps rather than on a competing story. Six prosecution witnesses were declared hostile at the trial. The two witnesses to the inquest deposed that they had signed on plain paper, and the inquest suggested death by firearm without naming any accused.

The most serious gap was the medical evidence. All four bodies were sent for post-mortem through a chaukidar who was never examined. The post-mortem was conducted the same afternoon at the Sadar Hospital, but the doctor was never examined and the post-mortem report was never exhibited or brought on record. A post-mortem report is not a document that falls within Section 293(4) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, so it does not prove itself; without the doctor, the deaths were never formally proved by medical evidence at all.

There was also the shape of the first information. The fardbeyan was recorded at 5 a.m. in the presence of several villagers and the prosecution witnesses, and yet the FIR was lodged against unknown persons, because the informant named nobody and did not even say that the assailants came from the neighbouring village.

What the State said in answer

The Additional Public Prosecutor met those points with authority. On identification, Dome Yadav v. State of Bihar holds that failure to hold a test identification parade does not make evidence of identification in court inadmissible, and where persons are known, identification is possible from speech, gait, gesture and special features. On the investigation, R. Baiju v. State of Kerala holds that a defective investigation does not automatically invalidate a prosecution where other credible evidence exists. On the witnesses, Darbara Singh v. State of Punjab and Abdul Sayeed v. State of Madhya Pradesh were relied on, the latter for the proposition that an injured witness comes with a built-in guarantee of presence at the scene and is unlikely to spare the real assailants in order to implicate someone falsely.

The Court worked through the evidence of the four witnesses put forward as eyewitnesses, including the informant and the injured witness, then the two investigating officers, and then the remaining witnesses, before turning to identification and to defective investigation as questions of law. Its conclusion on the facts was that the prosecution had not proved the case against the appellants.

“A different plan”

The Bench did not treat the failure as carelessness. On the face of the materials on record, it held, the administration responsible for conducting a free and fair investigation had a different plan, under which they remained totally inactive and grossly negligent, and in the process did not abide by their own instructions and guidelines in the matter of investigating a criminal case.

For what follows from that, the Court went to State of Gujarat v. Kishanbhai, where the Supreme Court set out the consequences of an acquittal produced by poor investigation. Every acquittal should be understood as a failure of the justice delivery system in serving the cause of justice, and should ordinarily lead to the inference that an innocent person was wrongfully prosecuted. The accused may be truly innocent, or may have succeeded because of the lapses of the investigating and prosecuting teams; either way those agencies are blameworthy, and the hardship suffered by an accused through a decade or more of litigation, and the financial ruin that can follow, is not to be overlooked. The Supreme Court directed every State to put a procedural mechanism in place.

The Patna High Court recorded that it has given directions of this kind before, to the Home Department and the Director General of Police, to look into matters where acquittals followed lapses by investigating officers, and that it is not known whether those orders are being complied with or have yielded any significant result.

Order

The appeals were allowed. The Court directed the Director General of Police, Bihar to constitute a three-member committee of senior police officers of repute to take a view on the manner in which the investigation was conducted by the investigating officer, who was never examined, and on the basis of that report to take an appropriate view on the administrative side within three months of receiving a copy of the judgment. The action taken is to be communicated to the appellants, who are at liberty to pursue the matter.

The Court further called on the Department of Home, Government of Bihar to apprise it of its policy for reviewing cases where lapses by the prosecution and the investigation have been pointed out, and to state in how many cases inquiries have been instituted and with what result, within one month, that report to be placed before the Court even as the appeals stand allowed. Copies of the judgment were directed to be sent to the Home Department, the office of the Director General of Police and the Director, Directorate of Prosecution, and to the trial court along with its records.