In Brief
Two men, Mehtab and Sushil, were convicted and sentenced to death for raping and murdering a 55-year-old Scheduled Caste woman in Uttarakhand in 2012. The case relied entirely on circumstantial evidence: witnesses claiming they saw two men asking about the victim before her death, recovery of her ornaments following the accused's confession, and a torn pocket from the crime scene matching the accused's shirt. The Supreme Court acquitted both men, finding the "last seen together" evidence weak and uncorroborated, the recovered items were from publicly accessible areas without proper witness procedures, and crucial forensic evidence had unexplained custody delays and chain-of-custody gaps. The Court held that brutal crime severity cannot substitute legal proof, and circumstantial evidence must form an unbroken chain excluding innocence.
The lawyer headnote and full judgment text are available to registered users.