Supreme Court Upholds Acquittal of Twenty Accused Where Ocular Account Could Not Be Reconciled With Medical Evidence
A bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and Augustine George Masih declined to reverse a Bombay High Court acquittal, finding that a single post-mortem injury could not support an account of four assailants beating the deceased continuously on the head.
The Supreme Court has dismissed appeals filed by the informant-mother and the State of Maharashtra seeking restoration of life sentences imposed on twenty persons convicted for the murder of Avinash Chavhan during the Holi festival of 2014. The Bombay High Court, Nagpur Bench, had on 2 February 2022 acquitted all twenty upon a reappreciation of the entire evidence. The Supreme Court, in a judgment authored by Justice Augustine George Masih and decided on 3 August 2026, found the High Court's view to be a reasonable and possible one on the record. The central finding was that the post-mortem examination disclosed only a single laceration on the deceased's scalp, a result the Court held was irreconcilable with the prosecution's own account of four persons beating him continuously on the head with iron pipes for two to three minutes.
The Incident and the Path to the Supreme Court
The prosecution case rested on events at Naik Nagar, Manora, District Washim on 18 March 2014. According to the prosecution, an earlier quarrel in the afternoon over the playing of a DJ at Somnath Nagar — roughly 2 to 2.5 kilometres away — escalated into a fatal assault. When the deceased Avinash, along with his father Devidas (PW-10), his brother Mukesh (PW-2), and his cousin Ganesh (PW-13), returned home by car at about 4:00 p.m., the accused persons allegedly caught hold of them, dragged them to a spot about 150 feet away in front of the house of accused Janardhan (A-1), and attacked them with iron pipes, an iron bar, and wooden planks. Avinash died at the spot from haemorrhage due to head injury. The three others sustained injuries, principally to the head.
FIR No. 38 of 2014 was registered the same day at 17:15 hours on the oral report of Nirmalabai (PW-19), the deceased's mother, who named 21 persons and attributed to each the weapon carried, the victim held, and the part of the body assaulted. A chargesheet was eventually filed against 23 accused for offences under Sections 147, 148, 149, 307, 302 and 120-B of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, read with Section 135 of the Bombay Police Act, 1951. One accused died during trial. The Sessions Trial No. 44 of 2014 before the In-charge Additional Sessions Judge, Mangrulpir (Camp at Washim), ended with the conviction of 20 accused on 10 August 2018. They were sentenced to imprisonment for life under Section 302 read with Section 149 IPC, rigorous imprisonment for seven years on each of three counts under Section 307 read with Section 149, and lesser terms under Sections 147 and 148, all running concurrently.
The convicted accused appealed to the Bombay High Court. The High Court allowed all six appeals and acquitted them, holding that the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt. The informant, who had not been a party before the High Court, obtained leave to file a special leave petition. The State of Maharashtra filed a separate special leave petition. Leave was granted in both, and the appeals were heard together.
The Conflict Between Ocular Testimony and Post-Mortem Findings
The Supreme Court identified the conflict between the ocular account and the medical evidence as “the weightier of the two grounds carrying the acquittal.” All six prosecution witnesses — the three injured and three eye-witnesses — deposed that four accused persons, each armed with an iron pipe, beat the deceased continuously upon the head. The post-mortem conducted by Dr. Gote (PW-21) on 19 March 2014 disclosed only a single laceration measuring 2 x 4 cm over the scalp with a fracture of the frontal bone beneath it.
In cross-examination, Dr. Gote stated that if four persons beat a person continuously for two to three minutes with four iron pipes and all blows fell on the same place, the head may have been crushed depending on the force of the blows. The High Court held it was impossible that four persons giving repeated blows with different weapons would land every blow upon the same site. The Supreme Court agreed. The Court found this conclusion was not conjecture but an inference drawn from the prosecution's own expert witness.
The trial court had sought to treat the discrepancy as a matter of exaggeration by witnesses speaking of their own suffering. The Supreme Court rejected that reasoning. Exaggeration, the Court held, might explain an overstatement of force or ferocity. It does not explain how an assault by four named assailants with four separate weapons registered as a single point of impact on the body of the deceased. This distinction, the Court said, was one which the trial court failed to address, and its significance was heightened because the conviction of twenty persons rested upon the attribution of separate acts to separate accused.
A further discord appeared in the evidence of PW-2 and PW-10, both of whom deposed that an eyeball of PW-10 had come out of its socket and that his teeth had been dislodged. The medical record dated 19 March 2014 showed PW-10's eyeball movement to be normal. The spot panchanama recorded no teeth at the place of the assault. Dr. Gote admitted he found no lacerated wound upon the chin, no injury upon the lower lip, and no lacerated wound upon the right eyebrow of PW-10. The High Court treated these as vital discrepancies. The Supreme Court said it was unable to hold the High Court was in error on this point.
The Identical Attribution of Roles to Twenty-Three Persons
The first ground on which the High Court acquitted was the identical character of the testimony of all six witnesses. Each of them — including those who were themselves under assault at the time — named every assailant, the weapon each carried, the victim each held, and the part of the body upon which each blow fell. The Supreme Court set out passages from the depositions of PW-2 and PW-10 to illustrate the correspondence, which extended to the precise pairing of accused persons to victims and weapons.
The Court held that where a single violent incident involving a large number of persons is witnessed by several persons differently placed, individual accounts will ordinarily bear the marks of individual perception. A correspondence as complete as the present one, extending to the description of the acts of 23 persons and given not immediately but some days after the occurrence, is of the opposite character. The Court held that a stereotyped and identical version bears the imprint of tutoring rather than truthful recollection, and that the High Court was entitled to regard it as raising a serious doubt.
The appellants pressed the argument that the principle of the parrot-like witness has no application to an injured witness, whose presence at the scene carries its own guarantee. The Court accepted the proposition as far as it went but drew a distinction: an injured witness is reliable as to the assault upon himself, but his evidence does not, for that reason alone, become a reliable inventory of the precise part played by each of 23 persons whom he recounted identically several days later. The Court also rejected the submission that the identical passages appeared only in cross-examination. The attribution of a specific role to each accused, the Court found, appeared in the examination-in-chief of each witness and in the oral report lodged on the day of the occurrence itself.
The Court also noted that the genesis of the entire episode was a quarrel between two persons over a DJ at a location 2.5 kilometres away. From that beginning, the prosecution arrayed 23 persons from four related families, most of whom were not residents of Naik Nagar and had no connection with that quarrel. Nine of the twenty convicted persons were attributed no weapon at all; their role was limited to holding a victim or shouting exhortations. In a case resting on constructive liability under Section 149 IPC, the Court said, the safe identification of the membership of the unlawful assembly is the very foundation of a conviction, and where that foundation rests exclusively on interested testimony of a stereotyped character, an appellate court is entitled to regard it as unsafe.
Further Infirmities: Witnesses, Delay, and Investigation
The assault took place in a residential locality. PW-1 admitted in cross-examination that forty to fifty persons had gathered at the spot. The oral report stated that residents had witnessed the incident. Despite this, not a single independent witness was examined, and even the panch witnesses were admittedly relatives. The High Court held the trial court ought to have drawn an adverse inference. The Supreme Court agreed, relying on its recent decision in Sanjay Kumar v. State of Bihar and Another (2026 INSC 735), where a like principle was applied when independent witnesses were withheld without satisfactory explanation.
There was also unexplained delay in recording the statements of PW-9 and PW-14, who were admittedly present when the police reached the spot, yet their statements were not recorded until 20 March 2014. The investigating officer PW-23 admitted their statements could have been recorded without delay. The statements of the injured witnesses were recorded from 24 March 2014 onwards, though hospital records showed them to be conscious and oriented. The trial court accepted the explanation for the delay in recording the injured witnesses' statements, but the trial court did not address the delay in the case of PW-9 and PW-14, for which no explanation was offered. The High Court held that this unexplained delay, in the setting of an entirely related and interested body of witnesses, left room for the construction of a version.
The investigation carried further defects. The carbon copy of the FIR sent to the Magistrate did not tally with the original, the columns as to time of registration and station diary entry being blank in one and written in ink in the other. The investigating officer PW-23 could not explain this. The case property was declined by the Chemical Analyser, Amravati, on 20 May 2014 because the lac seals were broken, and was thereafter resealed without any record. Both the trial court and the High Court excluded the Chemical Analyser's reports. The Court held that where substantive evidence is itself infirm, investigative lapses assume significance and their benefit enures to the accused.
Finally, it was brought on record through defence medical witnesses and documents that four accused had taken treatment for their own injuries on 21 March 2014. Dr. Gote admitted he had examined certain accused and issued medico-legal reports in respect of them, which did not form part of the chargesheet. The High Court held these injuries were withheld and remained unexplained, reinforcing doubt as to whether the true genesis of the occurrence had been placed before the court. The Supreme Court held this view accorded with the principle stated in Parshuram v. State of Madhya Pradesh (2023 INSC 973), that the non-explanation of injuries on accused persons creates doubt as to whether the prosecution has brought on record the real genesis of the incident.
The Standard for Interfering With an Acquittal Under Article 136
The Court restated that an appellate court will interfere with an order of acquittal only where it suffers from patent perversity, is founded on a misreading or omission to consider material evidence, or where no two reasonable views on the evidence are possible and the only view consistent with guilt is apparent. When this Court is invited to act under Article 136 of the Constitution of India, the restraint operates with added force: an order of acquittal reinforces the presumption of innocence, and this Court will not disturb it unless it is shown to be perverse, manifestly illegal, or productive of a gross miscarriage of justice.
The Court acknowledged that the High Court's reasoning was not free from imperfection. The High Court might have given more detailed notice to the recoveries effected under Section 27 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, and to the trial court's reasoning on the FIR discrepancy. The Court observed that the mere exhibiting of a memorandum does not by itself establish a recovery under Section 27. However, an error at the margin does not vitiate a conclusion otherwise sustainable on the record. The two findings that carried the acquittal — the medical improbability of the fatal assault as deposed to, and the unsafe character of the identification of a large assembly upon interested and stereotyped testimony — remained untouched.
Outcome
The Supreme Court found no ground to interfere with the High Court's judgment dated 2 February 2022. The prayer of the informant-appellant and the State of Maharashtra for the setting aside of that judgment and the restoration of the conviction and sentence recorded by the trial court was declined. Criminal Appeal Nos. 502–507 of 2023 and Criminal Appeal Nos. 508–513 of 2023 were dismissed. Pending applications, if any, were disposed of.