Papan Sarkar v. State of WB
Supreme Court of India2026 INSC 528Bench: Justice Sanjay Kumar and Justice K. Vinod Chandran
The Supreme Court reversed concurrent orders of conviction passed by the Trial Court and the Calcutta High Court and acquitted the appellants in a murder case founded principally on the 'last seen together' theory. The Bench reiterated that the last seen theory, though a recognised facet of circumstantial evidence, is among the weakest in the hierarchy of incriminating circumstances and must be approached with great caution. For the theory to be safely invoked as a basis of conviction, two requirements must be cumulatively satisfied: first, the proximity of time between the moment when the accused was last seen with the deceased and the time of the deceased's death must be so close as to virtually exclude the hypothesis of any third-party intervention; and second, even where this proximity is established, the theory by itself is rarely a sufficient foundation for conviction and must ordinarily be reinforced by other independent circumstances that complete the chain. The Court found that the time gap between the alleged last-seen moment and the discovery of the body was sufficiently large to render the death not proximate to the last-seen moment, and that the gap left ample room for the intervention of others. There being no other reliable circumstance — no recovery under Section 27 of the Evidence Act, no motive established beyond suspicion, no consistent ocular evidence — the chain of circumstances stood broken at its very first link. The Court therefore held that the benefit of the broken chain had necessarily to flow to the accused, and the conviction could not be sustained.