Upholding the acquittal in a Himachal double murder case, the Supreme Court has held that a DNA match placing the accused in the house proved only that she had been there at some point, and called the police’s failure to collect mobile tower locations a serious investigational lapse.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court has dismissed the Himachal Pradesh government’s appeal against the 2014 acquittal of a woman accused of strangling her stepmother and young stepbrother in Chamba district in 2011, holding that the circumstances relied on by the prosecution were neither proved beyond reasonable doubt nor formed a complete chain [The State of Himachal Pradesh v. Anchla @ Chanchla].
A Bench of Justice Manoj Misra and Justice Vijay Bishnoi, in a judgment authored by Justice Manoj Misra on October 1, 2026, found no reason to interfere with the Himachal Pradesh High Court’s judgment of July 28, 2014, which had set aside the trial court’s conviction of the accused under Section 302 IPC.
The case
On September 7, 2011, the father of the deceased woman told police that his daughter had been missing for six to seven days, that her house at Diur was locked and that a foul smell was coming from it. Police found her body and that of her minor son inside. The post-mortem showed death by strangulation five to seven days earlier.
The prosecution alleged that the accused, the daughter of the deceased woman’s husband from his first marriage, killed the two to grab property her father had allegedly bequeathed to the boy. It relied on a last-seen claim, a taxi driver and a hotel worker who said they saw her that night with a bleeding hand injury, the recovery of keys and the deceased’s mobile on her disclosure, and a DNA match between her blood and a bloodstain on a cabinet in the room. The Sessions Court at Chamba convicted her in 2012. The High Court acquitted her in 2014, and the State appealed.
The State argued that the High Court had discarded critical evidence on conjecture, including by suggesting that the accused’s blood may have been planted after her sample was taken, and that her blood at the scene and her bleeding injury on the night pointed only to her guilt.
Limited scope of an appeal against acquittal
The Bench began by recalling the settled position on interference with an acquittal:
“A judgement of acquittal has the obvious consequence of granting freedom to the accused. This Court has taken a consistent view that unless the judgment under appeal is contrary to the evidence or palpably erroneous or takes a view which could not have been taken by the court of competent jurisdiction, keeping in view the settled canons of criminal jurisprudence, this Court is reluctant to interfere with such judgment of acquittal.”
Witnesses who “appear” to have been set up
The Court found that the last-seen witness had improved on his earlier police statement. It held the taxi driver and the hotel worker untrustworthy, noting that the Investigating Officer “ducks the question and feigns ignorance” about when and why their statements were recorded. The taxi driver’s own cross-examination showed he was called to the police station after the accused’s arrest, when police already knew of her thumb injury and had her OPD slip. The Bench observed that the “possibility of PW-4 being used as a tool to weave a story appears more probable.”
Missing tower locations a “serious investigational lapse”
The Bench was critical of the handling of the call detail records. Though the numbers of the deceased woman and the accused were known, the CDRs collected did not show tower locations, and the CDR of the deceased woman’s phone was not even exhibited:
“Non-collection of tower location of the two mobiles is a serious investigational lapse in the facts of the case.”
It added that the suppression of the CDR and tower location “creates an impression that prosecution is suppressing vital information,” as it would have shown whether the deaths occurred when the prosecution claimed and whether the accused and the deceased were ever at the same place.
DNA match not conclusive
The Bench found it “puzzling” that every bloodstain from the scene had degraded except the one on the cabinet, and that the control sample from the cabinet was never sent for testing. Since the scientific expert was not cross-examined, it accepted the forensic report, but held that it did not clinch the case:
“Presence of blood of the accused in the room at best indicates that at some point in time the accused was present there. This does not indicate that the accused was present on 31.08.2011 or for that matter on any given date. Importantly, the prosecution case itself is that the accused had been visiting the house of the deceased regularly in the past.”
Her blood was not found on the clothes of the deceased or on the cloth allegedly used to strangle them. The motive was also not proved: there was no evidence of any bequest to the boy, and since her father left five daughters from his first marriage, the accused would not alone have benefited.
Summing up, the Bench held that “neither the incriminating circumstances were proved beyond reasonable doubt nor they constituted a chain so far complete as to exclude all hypothesis consistent with the innocence of the accused,” and dismissed the State’s appeal.
Why The Himachal Double Murder Judgment Matters
The ruling reaffirms that an acquittal will not be overturned unless it is perverse or a view that could not reasonably be taken, a high bar for the State in appeals filed more than a decade after the event. It also shows that a DNA match is not proof of guilt on its own: where the accused regularly visited the place, the presence of her blood shows only that she was there at some time, not on the night of the crime.
The judgment is equally a caution to investigators. Call detail records without tower locations, an unexhibited CDR and witnesses recorded without explanation after the arrest all weakened the prosecution, with the Court reading the gaps as suppression of vital information.
Case Title: The State of Himachal Pradesh v. Anchla @ Chanchla [Criminal Appeal No. 166 of 2019]
Neutral Citation: 2026 INSC 1074
Bench: Justice Manoj Misra and Justice Vijay Bishnoi, Supreme Court of India
Date of Judgment: October 1, 2026
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