The judgment emphasizes the importance of procedural compliance in recording confessions and the need for corroborating evidence to support convictions.

1. Four persons, Neharoo, Gohri, Chaitu and Sukhroo, stood their trial in the Court of the Sessions Judge, Raipur, on the charge of the murder of one Dau Satnami of mauza Derba. The deceased Dau was brutally murdered on the night of 2nd May last, and his body was found the following morning on the edge of a tank near the village with his throat out from side to side, his eyes gouged out, and other injuries on the head. All the ornaments which he had been wearing were missing: these included ornaments both of gold and silver. On the previous day the deceased had been with the accused, Chaitu, to a village some distance away, looking for a potential wife. He had already had two wives, one of whom had been turned out as it was found that she offended against the principle of exogamy, and the other had run away from him. He was a man of about 30 years of age, and the post mortem report describes him as stout, which we take to mean ''well-built''. On the evening of Saturday the 2nd of May, after his return he was sitting outside his house where he lived with his grandparents, when Chaitu called him to witness a dance which was going on in another house. He left with Chaitu and was not seen again. There is no evidence 'that he was seen at the dance or that he was seen by anybody at all after he left his home. The prosecution ease depended entirely on the statements made by one of the accused, namely the present appellant Neharoo. This accused on 9th May made a voluntary statement before a Magistrate, Mr. Purankar. In this statement he incriminated all the other accused but exculpated himself. In the course of the investigation the accused Neharoo is said to have stated that a pair of karas belonging to the deceased had been concealed by him in the biara of Sital (P.W. 1), and he recovered them from that place. These karas are Ex. B. As there was no evidence whatever against the accused Gohri and Sukhroo, they were acquitted. Neither was there any evidence against Chaitu beyond the fact that he had been with the deceased on the Saturday and had called him from his house that evening, and he too was acquitted. The appellant Neharoo has been convicted and sentenced to death.

2. It is manifest that the acquittals of the three of the accused are correct. Even if the confessional statement of Neharoo before the Magistrate had been self-inculpatory instead of self-exculpatory, as it was, it would have been insufficient by itself to form the basis of a conviction of his fellow-accused. His confessional statement itself, however (and it was retracted in the course of the trial), is open to such grave criticism that reliance on it, even to support the conviction of Neharoo, is impossible. The learned Sessions Judge, although he has admitted that the record of the confession was not made with due care and formality, and that the certificate which is required by Section 164, Criminal P.C., was not given, and that the accused's signature was not taken, has nevertheless held the confession admissible as the Magistrate who recorded it was called as P.W. 11 and has deposed that the confession was in his opinion voluntarily made.

3. The practice of allowing defects in the formalities in recording confessions to be cured by the application of Section 533, Criminal P.C., has been permitted of late years with considerable frequency in the Courts in India, and any omissions on the part of Magistrates recording confessions to comply with the formalities laid down in Sections 164 and 364 of the Code have been allowed to be condoned by the evidence of the Magistrates themselves as witnesses for the prosecution. The practice, and the theory underlying it, is crystallized in a Full Bench judgment of the Allahabad High Court in Mohammad Ali v. Emperor, 1934 AIR(All) 81. This practice has now received a check by a very recent ruling of their Lordships of the Privy Council in Nazir Ahmad v. King-Emperor where the practice is emphatically condemned and, by