Md. Ishaque and Others vs. State of West Bengal and Others,
Criminal Appeal No. 1421 of 2007 (Decided on May 3), 2013
The Hon’ble Supreme Court held:
“It is trite law that
the testimony of injured witnesses entitled to great weight and it is unlikely
that they would spare the real culprit and implicate an innocent person. Of
course, there is no immutable rule of appreciation of evidence that the
evidence of injured witnesses should be mechanically accepted, it also be in
consonance with probabilities”. [Para 12]
The Court relied on:
Makan Jivan and Ors. v. The State of Gujarat
(1971) 3 SCC 297;
Machhi Singh and Ors. v. State of Punjab (1983)
3 SCC 470;
Jangir Singh and Chet Singh and Ors. v. State of Punjab (2000)
10 SCC 261.
On the question of prime witnesses being interested witness,
the court held:
“We also fully endorse
the view of the High Court that the mere fact that some of the witnesses are
interested witnesses, that by itself is not a ground to discard their evidence,
the evidence taken as a whole supports the case of the prosecution.” [Para
11]
The Court relied on:
Hari Obula Reddy and Ors. v. The State of Andhra Pradesh
(1981) 3 SCC 675, in which the Court laid down certain broad guidelines to be
borne in mind, while scrutinizing the evidence of the eye-witnesses, in para 13
of the judgment. The Court held as follows:
“But it is well settled that interested evidence is not
necessarily unreliable evidence. Even partisanship by itself is not a valid
ground for discrediting or rejecting sworn testimony. Nor can it be laid down
as an invariable rule that interested evidence can never form the basis of conviction
unless corroborated to a material extent in material particulars by independent
evidence. All that is necessary is that the evidence of interested witnesses
should be subjected to careful scrutiny and accepted with caution. If on such
scrutiny, the interested testimony is found to be intrinsically reliable or inherently
probable, it may, by itself, be sufficient, in the circumstances of the
particular case, to base a conviction thereon. Although in the matter of
appreciation of evidence, no hard and fast rule can be laid down, yet, in most
cases, in evaluating the evidence of an interested or even a partisan witness,
it is useful as a first step to focus attention on the question, whether the
presence of the witness at the scene of the crime at the material time was
probable. If so, whether the substratum of the story narrated by the witness, being
consistent with the other evidence on record, the natural course of human
events, the surrounding circumstances and inherent probabilities of the case,
is such which will carry conviction with a prudent person. If the answer to these
question be in the affirmative, and the evidence of the witness appears to the
court to be almost flawless, and free from suspicion, it may accept it, without
seeking corroboration from any other source. Since perfection in this imperfect
world is seldom to be found, and the evidence of a witness, more so of an
interested witness, is generally fringed with embellishment and exaggerations,
however true in the main, the court may look for some assurance, the nature and
extent of which will vary according to the circumstances of the particular
case, from independent evidence, circumstantial or direct, before finding the
accused guilty on the basis of his interested testimony. We may again emphasise
that these are only broad guidelines which may often be useful in assessing
interested testimony, and are not iron-cased rules uniformly applicable in all
situations.”
Jaishree v. State of U.P. (2005) 9 SCC 788, wherein
this Court held that whether witnesses are interested persons and whether they
had deposed out of some motive cannot be the sole criterion for judging
credibility of a witness, but the main criterion would be whether their
physical presence at the place of occurrence was possible and probable.
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