The Supreme Court recently delivered a judgement in Putai vs. State of Uttar Pradesh (2025 INSC 1042), delivered on August 26, 2025 in which the Court acquitted two people accused of rape and murder of a minor.
The appellants, Putai (Accused No. 1) and Dileep (Accused No. 2), were convicted by the Additional Sessions Judge, Lucknow, on March 14, 2014, for offences under Sections 376(2)(g) (gang rape), 302 (murder), and 201 (destruction of evidence) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Putai was sentenced to death for the offense under Section 302 IPC, alongside rigorous life imprisonment for gang rape and seven years of rigorous imprisonment for destruction of evidence. Dileep received rigorous life imprisonment for both murder and gang rape. The Allahabad High Court subsequently confirmed Putai’s death penalty and dismissed the appeals on October 11, 2018.
The Supreme Court’s verdict to acquit the appellants, who had spent over a decade in custody, stands as an indictment of a criminal justice process plagued by systemic frailties, procedural negligence, and some parts of evidence characterized by the apex court as being “a piece of trash paper” due to no procedure having been followed. This article conducts an analysis of the Putai case, using it as a lens to expose the collapse of the evidentiary framework and the critical need for institutional accountability, particularly in capital punishment cases resting solely on circumstantial evidence.
Section I: The Collapse of the Evidentiary Framework: Circumstantial Evidence and the Burden of Proof
The prosecution’s case against Putai and Dileep was based on circumstantial evidence. In such trials, Indian jurisprudence requires an exceptionally high standard of proof, famously articulated in the Sharad Birdhichand Sarda vs. State of Maharashtra precedent, which demands the establishment of five “golden principles.” These principles mandate that the circumstances forming the conclusion of guilt must be fully established, must be consistent only with the hypothesis of the accused’s guilt, must be of a conclusive nature, must exclude every hypothesis except the one to be proved, and must form a chain of evidence so complete as not to leave any reasonable ground for a conclusion consistent with the innocence of the accused.
The Supreme Court, applying this rigorous standard, found that the prosecution in Putai failed to meet this high threshold at every turn. The Court recognised the critical distinction between circumstances that “may be proved” and those that “must be proved,” emphasising that the legal distance between the two “is small but has to be travelled before the prosecution can seek conviction of the accused”.[1]
A. The Failure to Establish Incriminating Circumstances
The prosecution sought to link Putai to the crime based on three core circumstantial elements: the recovery of the victim’s articles, the suspicious conduct of the accused, and the DNA evidence.
- Dubious Recovery of Articles: The personal articles of the child victim—chappals, a water canister, and an underwear—were found in a field, which accused No. 1, Putai, was cultivating. While the State argued that this shifted the burden onto Putai to explain the circumstances under Section 106 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, the Court found the recovery itself doubtful.[2]
The father, Munna, in his initial complaint, mentioned finding the chappals, water canister, and blood stains, but was totally silent regarding the recovery of the victim’s underwear. The Court found it “impossible to believe” that the search party, which included the victim’s father and others would have noticed the minor details like the chappals and water canister, yet missed the underwear in the same field. This omission was deemed “far too significant to be overlooked”.[3] The Supreme Court concluded that the recovery of the underwear seemed to be a “planted recovery and a creation by the Investigating Officer intended to give succour to the prosecution case”.[4]
- The Sniffer Dog Theory against Dileep: The prosecution’s case against accused No. 2, Dileep largely rested on the claim that a small male comb was recovered from a field, and a sniffer dog, after smelling the comb, led the police to Dileep’s house. The Court stated that this theory is “shrouded in a cloud of doubt and unacceptable on the face of record”.[5]
- Contradictory Identification: Multiple prosecution witnesses offered starkly conflicting testimonies regarding the comb’s colour: one said bluish-green, another said dirty and light red, another said sky-blue, and Investigating Officer said green. These contrasting versions made the recovery itself doubtful.
- Implausible Linkage: The claim that witnesses could identify the comb, an ordinary plastic item, as belonging to Dileep simply because they had seen him using it was found to be “absolutely farfetched and unbelievable”. The Court viewed this insistence as a “strong indicator” that the prosecution was “hell bent upon implicating the accused No. 2-Dileep in this case by hook or by crook”.[6]
- Procedural Failure: The entire sniffer dog procedure lacked contemporary documentation. Furthermore, the Investigating Officer claimed he had immediately sealed the comb at the spot, which logically meant it could not have been available for the sniffer dog to smell, rendering the entire theory unworthy of credence.
- Suspicious Conduct of Putai: The High Court and Trial Court treated the testimony the victim’s mother, as incriminating. She claimed to have seen Putai rushing into his house, washing his hands and face, changing his clothes, and then going away on his cycle without inquiring about the commotion regarding the missing child.
The Supreme Court firmly rejected the inference of guilt. The Court observed that washing hands and changing clothes after returning from work was “absolutely natural” behaviour for a labourer or farmer, and would not raise suspicion.[7] Furthermore, Putai’s explanation in his Section 313 CrPC statement—that his parents were ill and hospitalised—provided an innocent context for his haste and preoccupation, a fact admitted by the victim’s in cross-examination.[8]
Section II: The Forensic Catastrophe: DNA Evidence and the Broken Chain of Custody
The handling of forensic evidence in the Putai case was so flawed that the Supreme Court described the resulting reports as “a piece of trash paper” and concluded they “pale into insignificance”. This systematic failure reveals catastrophic lapses in collection, preservation, and analysis that fall far short of established international standards.[9]
A. Inadmissible and Contradictory DNA Reports
The first DNA examination report dated January 18, 2014 was inconclusive, merely stating that a “male specific allele” was found in the victim’s slide and swab, with no opinion regarding the blood samples of Putai and Dileep.
Years later, during the High Court appeal, the prosecution produced a supplementary DNA report (dated December 2, 2014) via an affidavit dated April 12, 2017. This new report, generated using Y-Filer Kit and HID Kit tests, contradictorily claimed that the material from the victim’s slide matched the allele profiles of both Putai and Dileep.
The Supreme Court found this supplementary report to be “inconsequential and inadmissible” due to a host of fatal procedural flaws:
- Denial of Rebuttal: The supplementary DNA report was never put to the accused-appellants under Section 313 CrPC, denying them the statutory right to explain or rebut the new incriminating material.[10]
- Unexamined Expert: The scientific expert, who issued the reports, was not recalled or re-examined on oath to prove the contradictory supplementary report.[11]
- Improper Use of Affidavit: The supplementary report was tendered via the affidavit of an officer (Deputy Director, FSL, Lucknow) who was not connected with the issuance of the report. The Court clarified that the DNA report is a substantive piece of evidence, not merely formal, and thus could not be tendered in evidence through an affidavit under Section 293 of the CrPC (now Section 329 of the BNSS, 2023).[12]
- Breach of Sanctity: Given that the scientific expert did not state that any forensic material was preserved for further examination after the first report, the Court presumed the samples must have been opened or consumed. Once the samples were opened, their sanctity was breached, rendering any subsequent supplementary analysis unreliable.[13]
B. The Catastrophic Breakdown of the Chain of Custody
The most critical failure was the complete absence of proof regarding the chain of custody, which is essential to guarantee that evidence has not been contaminated or tampered with.[14] The specific failures were comprehensive:
- Collection Procedure: The blood samples of the accused were collected on November 26, 2012, nearly two and a half months after their arrest on September 7, 2012. The prosecution failed to provide any oral evidence or exhibit any document to prove the procedure, date, or time of drawing these blood samples.
- Consent: Although consent of the accused-appellants was purportedly taken before drawing the samples, no document proving such consent was exhibited in evidence.
- Post-mortem Samples Discrepancy: The medical professionals provided contradictory evidence regarding the collection of samples from the victim’s body. One stated she took two vaginal swabs and two smear slides but did not mention sealing them or the date of transmission. Another stated he took eight slides of smear and swabs, and claimed they were seized, sealed, and handed over to Constables. However, he failed to prove any document pertaining to this procedure, such as a memorandum of sealing.
- Transmission and Storage: The prosecution failed to examine the official(s) who carried the samples to the FSL or the malkhana (evidence room) In-charge.
Critically, not a single document pertaining to the safe keeping or transmission of the samples—including the malkhana register, roznamcha entry, forwarding letter, or the receipt issued from the FSL—was exhibited during the trial.
The Court concluded that the failure to prove the relevant documentation for collection and the “total lack of evidence regarding the chain of custody” of the blood samples made the entire exercise “farce and frivolous.”
Section III: A System on Trial: Investigative Incompetence and the Crisis of Accountability
The final acquittal was not merely due to weak evidence, but was a direct consequence of what the Supreme Court deemed a “lacklustre and shabby investigation and so also laconic trial procedure”. This institutional failure crippled the search for truth from the very outset.[15]
A. A Catalogue of Critical Investigative Omissions
The Court identified several fundamental errors that demonstrated either gross incompetence or deliberate fabrication:
- Failure to Send Crucial Evidence to FSL: The Investigating Officer seized the victim’s clothes, including the frock and the underwear, but inexplicably did not forward these crucial articles to the FSL for scientific analysis. The Court found it surprising that in a case of sexual assault and murder, the IO did not send these articles, giving rise to a “strong suspicion that the recovery of these articles was a planted recovery”.
- Failure to Search Accused’s House: Despite the prosecution’s own theory that Putai rushed home and changed his clothes, no extensive search of the accused-appellants’ house was made to look for incriminating evidence. This omission reinforced the Court’s view that the ‘suspicious conduct’ theory was an “exaggeration”.[16]
- Failure to Examine Neighbours: The incident occurred in open fields, accessible to “all and sundry”. Although the incident happened between 7:00 PM and 8:00 PM when darkness was beginning to fall, the police did not care to examine anyone from the neighbouring fields or locality. This failure created doubt regarding the bona fides of the police actions.[17]
- Failure to Identify Material Objects: The material objects (clothes, etc.) were exhibited in the evidence of the Investigating Officer, but were never shown to the victim’s parents, Munna and Chandravati, for identification when they testified.[18]
B. Capital Punishment and the Constitutional Imperative
The fact that Putai was awarded and confirmed a death sentence on the basis of such flimsy evidence demonstrates the profound risk within India’s capital punishment regime. The irreversible nature of the death penalty demands that it only be imposed in the “rarest of rare” cases, based on unimpeachable, cogent evidence. The Putai case serves as a terrifying example of how investigative incompetence and flawed judicial scrutiny at the lower court levels can lead to the gravest miscarriage of justice by extinguishing a human life irretrievably.
C. The Double Tragedy: Denial of Justice for the Victim
While the acquittal corrected the injustice against the accused, it simultaneously constitutes a a tragic failure of justice for the minor child victim and her family. The gruesome act of rape and murder remains unsolved. The investigation not only failed to secure a conviction but also likely destroyed the possibility of ever identifying and prosecuting the actual perpetrator.
This situation results in a “secondary victimisation” of the family, who are left without closure or justice, their faith in the system shattered due to institutional incompetence. The acquittal, in this context, is not an endpoint of justice but a marker of its complete absence, proving that a flawed investigation is the antithesis of both the accused’s right to a fair trial and the victim’s right to meaningful justice.
Conclusion
The Supreme Court demonstrated that the conviction, upheld by two lower courts, rested on a foundation of conjectures and procedural violations, where the fundamental principles governing circumstantial evidence were ignored and scientific evidence, vital in such cases, was rendered “worthless” due to an absolute lack of procedural rigor.
However, the tragedy of Putai lies in its double failure: it subjected the accused to a decade-long ordeal under the shadow of the death penalty, while simultaneously failing the minor victim and her family by making the accountability of the actual assailant impossible. The judgment is an urgent call for systemic overhaul. True justice for both the innocent accused and the grieving victim can only be achieved through a system built on a bedrock of scientific integrity, rigorous adherence to procedure, and unwavering accountability for all institutional actors.
(The author is part of the legal research team of the organisation)
[1] Para 69
[2] Para 37
[3] Para 43
[4] Para 56
[5] Para 36
[6] Para 38
[7] Para 32
[8] Para 35
[9] Para 75
[10] Para 66
[11] Para 66
[12] Para 75
[13] Para 64
[14] Para 65
[15] Para 73
[16] Para 71
[17] Para 74
[18] Para 68
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