JUDGMENT

Vinod Chandran, J.

If it is permissible in law to obtain evidence from the accused person by compulsion, why tread the hard path of laborious investigation and prolonged examination of other men, materials and documents? It has been well said that an abolition of this privilege would be an incentive for those in charge of enforcement of law “to sit comfortably in the shade rubbing red pepper into a poor devil’s eyes rather than go about in the sun hunting up evidence”.

(Stephen, History of Criminal Law, p. 442).

State of Bombay v. Kathi Kalu Oghad [1962 SCR (3) 10] Confessions may have an element of truth in it but it fails to persuade the Judges, in travelling the distance between 'may be true' and 'must be true'; the whole of which distance, as has been held in Sarwan Singh v. State of Punjab [1957] 1 SCR 953], must be covered by 'legal, reliable and unimpeachable evidence'.

2. Inexplicable violence as a retaliatory measure against establishments of State, based on religion and community, often questions the secular credentials of a society; particularly of this State which proudly proclaims itself to be the most literate in all of the Country. The reverberations of the t