The main legal point established in the judgment is the interpretation of circumstantial evidence, the sufficiency of corroboration for a confession implicating a co-accused, and the application of Section 30 of the Evidence Act.

Waller, J.

1. Appellant 1 (Pammu, accused 1) has been convicted of the murder of one Rosario Minezes. The 2nd (Uggappa Pujari-Accused 2) has been convicted of having helped her to dispose of the body. The Public Prosecutor has appealed against his acquittal on the charge of murder.

2. The case against appellant 1 is, we think, clear enough quite apart from the admissions that are attributed to her. She and Rosario had been on terms of intimacy but had fallen out shortly before the murder and she had been heard to threaten to kill him. It is proved that, on the night of the murder he was seen entering her house and was never, after that, seen alive and human blood was found in and near her house. She gave up to the police a pole and rope which had apparently been used for transporting the dead body to the place where it was found, and they also were stained with human blood. In addition she is said to have made a full confession to P.W. 10 implicating herself and appellant 2 in the murder. On this we do not propose to rely as it seems to us not unlikely that P.W. 10 knows a great deal more about the affair than he will admit. There is, further, the statement she made to the Committing Magistrate in which she admitted having killed Rosario but added that it was P.W. 10 and not appellant 2 that helped her to dispose of the dead body. As P.W. 10 himself admits that he was sent for by her and asked to help, it is more than possible that there was a good deal of truth in what she told the Committing Magistrate. On the whole, we think that she was rightly convicted.

3. As regards appellant 2 we are unable to understand the process of reasoning by which the Sessions Judge arrived at the conclusion that, though there was enough circumstantial corroboration of appellants alleged confession to P.W. 10 to justify him in convicting appellant 2 under Section 201, I. P C. there was not enough to support the charge of murder against him. Obviously, if it was enough to justify a conviction for the one offence, it was equally adequate to support a conviction for the other. As regards the nature of the corroboration requisite to support the confession of one co-accused implicating himself and another, the Sessions Judge followed the opinion expressed by Jackson, J. in Empress v. Ashutosh Chuckerbutty [1879] 4 Cal. 483 that an accused person ought not to be convicted on the ground of such confession corroborated by circumstantial evidence unless the circumstances constituting corroboration would, if believed to exist, themselves support a conviction.

4. In other words, Section 30, Evidence Act, cannot be used except in cases where the use of it is entirely superfluous. With great respect, it seems to us that much of the law laid down by Courts in India in regard to that section is coloured by the dislike felt by English lawyers for any provision in an Indian Statute that departs from the law of England. That dislike was plainly expressed by the learned Chief Justice of this Court in Lilaram Gangammal. In re A.I.R. 1924 Mad. 805 where he described Section 30 as a needless tampering with the wholesome rule of the English law.

5. The Indian Statute does depart from the English rule on the subject and we see no reason why its effect should be whittled down till the two are indistinguishable. If it were necessary for us to decide the point, we should follow the opinion of Garth, C.J., in the Calcutta case above referred to, that the question of what corroborative evidence is sufficient, with the confession, to support a conviction must depend on the circumstances of each particular case.

6. The Sessions Judge was, of course, not justified in his finding that there was nothing against appellant 2 but the confession of his co-accused. There was a great deal more in the evidence of P.W. 10 than that. Believing the evidence as he did, the Session Judge might well have convicted appellant 2 of murder on it. What P.W. 10 said was this:

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