The Supreme Court declined to restore a murder conviction in an Andhra Pradesh feud killing but faulted the High Court for altering it to culpable homicide on “surmises and conjectures.”
New Delhi: The Supreme Court has declined to restore a murder conviction in a decades-old Andhra Pradesh feud killing, but in doing so faulted the High Court for having reduced the conviction from murder to culpable homicide on the strength of reasoning it described as based “purely on surmises and conjectures” — including a theory that no witness had ever deposed to [State of Andhra Pradesh v. Ponthati Siva Rami Reddy and Others].
A Bench of Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and Atul S. Chandurkar dismissed the State’s appeal, leaving the accused with the six-year sentence the High Court had imposed under Section 304 Part II of the Indian Penal Code — but recorded its express disapproval of the manner in which the High Court had arrived at that outcome.
The two courts below
The four accused were convicted by the Sessions Court at Kadapa under Section 302 read with Section 34 of the IPC — murder committed in furtherance of common intention — and sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing of a man in a dispute rooted in a long-standing family feud, in which the victim’s grandfather-generation and the accused’s family had been at enmity for years, including an earlier killing dating to 1997.
On the accused’s appeal, the High Court altered the conviction to one under Section 304 Part II — culpable homicide not amounting to murder, where the act is done with knowledge that it is likely to cause death but without the intention to cause it — and reduced the sentence to six years’ rigorous imprisonment. The State of Andhra Pradesh appealed to the Supreme Court seeking restoration of the murder conviction, while the accused, who had by then served the six-year term, urged that the matter be left undisturbed.
The evidence that would not hold together
The Supreme Court’s own re-appreciation of the record found the prosecution case beset by material inconsistencies that made restoration of the murder conviction untenable.
The cited eyewitness, PW1, had turned hostile. On the crucial question of where the victim was attacked, his account — that the assault took place in the fields, after which he carried the victim to a graveyard — could not be reconciled with the brother PW3’s version that the attack occurred at the graveyard, that he had seen the accused fleeing the spot with sickles and iron rods, and that a jeep was brought to carry the victim to hospital. PW1 and PW2, by contrast, spoke of carrying the victim to his house and made no mention of PW3’s presence or of any jeep. The Court found that these divergences threw a genuine doubt over both the site of the occurrence and whether the accused were in fact present there immediately afterwards.
The doubtful dying declaration
Much of the conviction had rested on a detailed statement said to have been made by the victim shortly before his death. The Court treated that statement with considerable suspicion.
It ran to a page and a half — a “blow by blow” account, in the Court’s words, vividly narrating the previous enmity and the manner of the attack in detail. The victim had suffered twenty-two injuries, many of them grievous, four caused by a sharp-edged weapon and the rest by a blunt object. That a victim so seriously wounded could have given so elaborate and coherent a narration was, the Court held, itself doubtful — the more so because the treating doctor had accepted that tranquillisers would be administered to a patient with such injuries, that a head-injury patient may not remain continuously conscious, and that speech could be slurred. There were, further, unexplained corrections and overwriting on the documents recording both the time the medical intimation reached the police and the time the statement was taken, and the investigating officer had failed to explain a series of omissions — including the absence of any reference to the victim’s bloodstains on the clothes of those who claimed to have carried him.
Taken together, the Court held, these infirmities meant the evidence was simply not sufficient to restore a conviction for murder.
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The High Court’s reasoning disapproved
While the outcome — the Section 304 Part II conviction standing — was left intact, the Supreme Court was pointed in its criticism of how the High Court had reached it. The High Court had modified the conviction on the footing that the accused could not have intended to kill, reasoning that armed assailants bent on murder would not have left the victim alive and able to speak. Crucially, the High Court had itself acknowledged that no witness had deposed to the version it then proceeded to construct. The Supreme Court set out that passage in full:
“Though no witness spoke on these lines, what appears to this Court is that, on the eventful night, the farmers went to the field for irrigating their crops, may be on account of shortage of power or water; and in a scuffle, the deceased received serious injuries in the hands of the accused. Had there been a clear intention, or plan for the accused to kill the deceased, there would not be an occasion for the deceased being shifted to the hospital, and is being in a position to speak. If four persons, armed with deadly weapons, attack an individual, with an objective of killing him, normally, they would leave the spot, only after confirming that the attacked person breathed his last.”
Faulting this approach, the Court observed that the High Court, “having itself noted that no witness had deposed on the aforesaid lines, there was no reason at all for it to comment further on the matter,” and held that the observations were “based purely on surmises and conjectures.” A court, in other words, cannot supply from its own imagination a factual scenario that the evidence does not contain, and then use that constructed scenario to decide the degree of the offence.
Why the appeal was still dismissed
Having disapproved the High Court’s reasoning, the Court nonetheless declined to disturb the result. The evidence, it reiterated, was not sufficient to restore the murder conviction; the accused had not challenged their conviction under Section 304 Part II; and they had already served the six-year sentence imposed. In those circumstances, the Court held, the matter “deserves a quietus,” and dismissed the State’s appeal.
Background
The prosecution’s case was that on the intervening night of March 8-9, 2006, the victim, who had gone to water his crops accompanied by PW1, was set upon by the four accused armed with sickles and iron pipes and left grievously injured at the spot. He was shifted to a Government Hospital, where his statement was recorded early the next morning before he succumbed to his injuries at 7.30 a.m. The trial court, after examining seventeen prosecution witnesses, convicted all four of murder in 2009; the High Court altered that to culpable homicide in 2014; and the State’s appeal against that alteration has now been dismissed, more than two decades after the feud that underlay the killing first turned fatal.
Case Title: The State of Andhra Pradesh, Home Department v. Ponthati Siva Rami Reddy and Others [Criminal Appeal No. 2120 of 2017]
Bench: Justice Ujjal Bhuyan and Justice Atul S. Chandurkar
Citation: 2026 INSC 820
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