CHENNAI: A division bench of the Madras High Court reiterated that statements recorded under Section 164 of the CrPC could not be considered as substantive evidence and relied upon for conviction.The bench of justices S Vaidyanathan and AD Jagadish Chandira said: “The law is well settled that a statement recorded under Section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure is not substantive evidence ... it can be used to corroborate the statement of a witness and it can be used to contradict a witness.”
The Supreme Court (in Baij Nath Sah vs State of Bihar - 2010) also held that the mere statement of the prosecutor recorded under the section was not enough to convict the appellant, the high court quoted while quashing the conviction and the sentence of life imprisonment awarded to Siva, the appellant.Siva was convicted for murdering his live-in partner Chinnaponnu in 2010. He committed the crime in a fit of rage over her refusal to register her property in the name of his children.
The bench noted that the trial court (additional district court, Vellore) held in its 2018 order that though the eyewitnesses to the incident turned hostile, their statements recorded under Section 164 of the CrPC corroborated the medical evidence viz., the wounds found on the body as revealed in the postmortem certificate. It, thus, found the appellant guilty.
Strangely, however, the trial court ignored the fact that there was a long delay in recording the statements of the witnesses. Such a long delay speaks much, they said. In this case, as stated above, the eyewitnesses (including a close relative of the deceased) and the recovery witnesses had not supported the case of the prosecution ... though there is medical evidence to the effect that the bloodstains on the shirt of the appellant and the blood group of the deceased were matching, it has not been specifically mentioned as to whether the blood group was ‘B’ positive or ‘B’ negative.
“Even assuming that it matches completely, that alone cannot lead to a conclusion of the culpability of the appellant/accused in the absence of a detailed serological comparison and it cannot be used as an incriminating piece of evidence as against the appellant, when especially, the recovery of the shirt of the appellant is unbelievable in view of the fact that the witness to the recovery had also turned hostile,” the judges held.