In Brief
A woman with severe burn injuries made two recorded statements to police and a magistrate, consistently naming her attacker as an unknown outsider in white clothes, with no mention of her husband or in-laws. Her father later testified she confessed the husband had tortured her and caused the fire. The Supreme Court held that the two formal, recorded dying declarations—made to independent witnesses following proper procedure—were reliable and consistent, while the informal oral statement to her father could be an afterthought or influenced by relatives. Since the two sets of evidence contradicted and the formal declarations favoured the accused, conviction could not stand. The Court emphasized that dying declarations require scrupulous examination and cannot rest on oral hearsay alone when contradicted by formal recorded statements.
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