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Kinship doesn’t mean partisan evidence: court

New Delhi: Merely because eyewitnesses are family members of a victim their evidence cannot per se be discarded as ‘interested witnesses,’ the Supreme Court has held.

When there is an allegation of interestedness, it has to be established. A mere statement that relatives of a deceased person are likely to falsely implicate the accused cannot be a ground to discard their evidence which is otherwise cogent and credible, said a Bench consisting of Justices Arijit Pasayat and Mukundakam Sharma.

“Relationship is not a factor to affect credibility of a witness. It is more often than not that a relation would not conceal the actual culprit and make allegations against an innocent person. Foundation has to be laid if a plea of false implication is made. In such cases, the court has to adopt a careful approach and analyse evidence to find out whether it is cogent and credible.”

Writing the judgment, Justice Pasayat said: “The mechanical rejection of such evidence on the sole ground that it is partisan would invariably lead to failure of justice. No hard and fast rule can be laid down as to how much evidence should be appreciated. Judicial approach has to be cautious in dealing with such evidence; but the plea that such evidence should be rejected because it is partisan cannot be accepted as correct.”

The Bench said: “The maxim falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus [false in one thing, false in everything] has no application in India and the witnesses cannot be branded liars. This maxim has not received general acceptance, nor has it come to occupy the status of rule of law. It is merely a rule of caution and cannot be called ‘a mandatory rule of evidence’.”

The court said: “The doctrine is a dangerous one, especially in India, for, if a whole body of testimony was to be rejected, because a witness was evidently speaking an untruth in some aspect, it is to be feared that administration of criminal justice would come to a dead-stop.”

In the instant case, a sessions court in Punjab awarded life sentence to Bur Singh and another accused in a case of murder while acquitting a third person. This was confirmed by the Punjab and Haryana High Court. The two moved the apex court, challenging their conviction on the ground that reliance was placed on the evidence of close relatives of the victim and further on the same evidence another co-accused was acquitted.

The apex court dismissed the appeals and asked them to surrender to custody to serve the remainder of their sentence.

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