Four threatening letters, expert never examined: Supreme Court acquits husband of abetting wife suicide
Justice Sandeep Mehta and Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya set aside a Section 306 conviction because the prosecution never proved who wrote the letters, and the letters would not have amounted to abetment anyway.
The prosecution had four postcards. They were abusive, they threatened to kill, and the State said they drove a woman to set herself on fire. The Supreme Court has now found that the prosecution never proved the husband wrote them, because the handwriting expert who compared them was never put in the witness box.
On 3 November 2026 a bench of Justice Sandeep Mehta and Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya acquitted Goverdhan of abetting his wife’s suicide under Section 306 of the Indian Penal Code. A trial court in Jaipur had sentenced him to ten years’ rigorous imprisonment, and the Rajasthan High Court had upheld it.
Justice Mehta wrote the judgment, which is marked reportable. The bench went further than the missing expert. It held that even if Goverdhan wrote every letter, their contents did not amount to abetment.
Ten years in Jaipur, upheld in 2017
Goverdhan married Anju on 21 November 1996, and they had a son. The prosecution alleged that he and his father harassed her over dowry and other demands, and that she was turned out of the matrimonial home in February 2009.
She lodged FIR No. 14 of 2009 on 5 February 2009 under Sections 498-A, 406 and 323 of the IPC. She also brought proceedings under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 and sought maintenance.
The prosecution said the harassment did not stop. It alleged that he used the fact that his elder brother was in the police to dissuade her from legal remedies, and that he sent her four letters with abusive language and threats to kill her.
Anju set herself on fire at her parental home on 18 January 2011 and died of the burns the same day. Her mother filed a complaint before a Jaipur magistrate on 2 February 2011, and FIR No. 45 of 2011 followed at Galta Gate police station under Section 306.
The Additional Sessions Judge, Women Atrocities Cases No. 1, Jaipur Metropolitan, tried the case as Sessions Case No. 27 of 2011. The prosecution examined 16 witnesses and produced exhibits P-1 to P-49.
On 9 December 2016 the trial court convicted Goverdhan and sentenced him to ten years’ rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs 50,000, with three months more in default. A Single Judge of the Rajasthan High Court at Jaipur dismissed his appeal on 11 May 2017, holding that continuous harassment and humiliation amounted to instigation.
The defence: an accidental fire
In his statement under Section 313 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, Goverdhan denied the incriminating circumstances. He said his wife had lived at her parents’ home for the previous three years and he had neither met nor spoken to her.
He said she had in all probability died in an accidental fire, and that her family dressed it up as suicide to implicate him because of the strife between the spouses. His elder brother Raj Kumar appeared as defence witness DW-1.
Senior Advocate Sushil Kumar Jain appeared for Goverdhan, and Additional Advocate General Sansriti Pathak for the State of Rajasthan.
What the record said about the fire
The bench began with the first documents. The SMS Hospital admission ticket (Exhibit D-5) shows she was admitted to the Burn Ward at 11:30 am on 18 January 2011. The case history was given by her elder sister, who said Anju was alone at home when a sudden fire broke out.
The inquest panchnama (Exhibit P-1) recorded statements from her father and brother. They said she died of burning but did not say how the fire began. Their statements, the Court said, did not even faintly indicate that she had killed herself.
Her mother’s complaint came 15 days after the death. The Forensic Science Laboratory’s spot report (Exhibit P-33), made on the day, recorded no smell of kerosene.
One of the first police officers at the site, Assistant Sub-Inspector Bhagwan Singh (PW-16), agreed in cross-examination that there had been an electric short circuit in the room and that a gas cylinder was there.
Three contemporaneous police records pointed the same way. The control room entry noted a fire at the premises, the wireless record a woman burned in an electric short circuit and taken to hospital, and the duty officer’s register a gas cylinder.
Four postcards, and nothing to compare them with
The only palpable evidence of abetment, the bench said, was the four postcard letters (Exhibits P-16 to P-19). To show the husband wrote them, the prosecution relied on the handwriting expert’s report (Exhibit P-47).
The Investigating Officer never took specimen handwriting from Goverdhan. The comparison writings were an application said to have been handed over at his arrest (Exhibit P-24) and a pocket diary his elder brother produced (Exhibit P-46).
The expert’s opinion therefore depended on the similarities found and also on proof that the comparison writings were really Goverdhan’s. Without that, the bench said, the opinion could not conclusively show he wrote the letters.
Why handwriting experts must be examined
The bench called handwriting identification a science that is not infallible, and said an expert’s opinion needs caution. It reproduced the passage from Magan Bihari Lal v. State of Punjab, (1977) 2 SCC 210, which cautions against convicting on a handwriting expert’s opinion without substantial corroboration.
In Magan Bihari Lal the accused was a railway guard with no connection to the wagon or the forged receipt. This Court called it extremely hazardous to condemn him on a handwriting expert’s opinion alone, and treated such opinion as weak and infirm evidence that cannot by itself found a conviction.
It then turned to Patel Babubhai Manohardas v. State of Gujarat, 2025 SCC OnLine SC 503. A party relying on a handwriting expert’s report to attribute a document to someone must examine the expert, because comparison is not a perfect science and can be read differently.
That case also involved a suicide note, and the Court there found that the expert had not been examined and the accused had not admitted the report. It added that no act of incitement was attributed to the accused close to the date of the suicide.
Such reports, the bench noted, are not admissible under Section 293 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (now Section 329 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023). They must be proved like any other report, with the expert tested in cross-examination. Here the prosecution did not examine him.
The trial court had also reasoned that Goverdhan had not specifically denied writing the letters in his Section 313 statement. The bench rejected that. The prosecution, it said, must “stand on its own legs” (para 24), and cannot draw strength from the weakness of the defence or from an omission to deny a circumstance specifically.
No link between the letters and the death
The bench said the trial court and the High Court fell into grave error in relying on Exhibits P-16 to P-19 without proof of who wrote them. It then looked at whether the evidence tied the letters to the death.
Her father (PW-1) did not say she was perturbed on receiving the letters. Her brother (PW-2) suggested she fell into depression but did not refer to any of the letters. Her mother (PW-3) said she was in shock after receiving them, which the bench said also seemed a sheer exaggeration.
The complaint was lodged after about 15 days with no satisfactory explanation. If the family knew she was distressed by letters received just before her death, the bench said, the witnesses would have said so at the inquest and the incident would have been reported at the earliest.
The bench also noted that the prosecution did not propose a charge under Section 498-A against Goverdhan. If the letters were grave enough to cause mental harassment that drove her to end her life, it said, such a charge was essential.
Hostile letters that also pleaded for reconciliation
The bench then assumed, for argument, that Goverdhan wrote the letters, and read them in full. They did contain abusive, derogatory and at places threatening expressions.
They also carried fervent appeals for reconciliation, including requests that his wife withdraw the pending court cases and resume living with him. Exhibit P-16, in particular, asked her to live with him cordially and withdraw the litigation, in language mixed with threats and insults.
The letters, it said, also reflected his fear that the proceedings would hurt him, the whole family and their son. The suggestion that she keep away from lawyers, doctors and police personnel had to be read against his repeated appeals to withdraw the cases.
The question that remained, the bench said, was:
“whether the prosecution has established, beyond reasonable doubt, that the appellant’s conduct, viewed in its entirety and in the circumstances of the case, constituted abetment of suicide within the meaning of Sections 306 and 107 IPC” (para 29)
Its answer was that it had not. Anju had left his company and had lived at her father’s house for more than two years before the incident, and she had begun litigation and was pursuing it.
The letters, the bench held, could not be the immediate instigating cause. The prosecution had “failed to prove with any degree of certainty that the appellant instigated or abetted” her to end her life (para 30).
Order
The Court allowed the appeal and set aside the judgments of the trial court and the High Court. Goverdhan stands acquitted of the charge under Section 306 of the IPC.
He was on bail, so he need not surrender, and his bail bonds are discharged. Pending applications were disposed of.