Impounding of Instruments, and Admissibility in Evidence

In one line

An officer who is shown a document that is not duly stamped must seize it, and no such document can be used in evidence or acted upon until the duty and a penalty have been paid.

In exam wording: section 33 requires every person having authority to receive evidence, and every person in charge of a public office, to impound an instrument produced before him which appears to him not to be duly stamped; and section 34 provides that no instrument chargeable with duty shall be admitted in evidence for any purpose, or be acted upon, registered or authenticated, unless it is duly stamped.

Section 33: the duty to impound

Who must impound. Every person having by law or consent of parties authority to receive evidence, and every person in charge of a public office. So a judge, an arbitrator and a registering officer are all within it.

Who is excepted. An officer of police, and any other officer empowered by law to investigate offences. An investigating officer collecting documents is not to be turned into a revenue collector.

The obligation. If it appears to him that an instrument produced before him, or coming before him in the performance of his functions, and chargeable in his opinion with duty, is not duly stamped, he shall impound the same, irrespective of whether the instrument is or is not valid in law.

Those last words matter. The officer does not stop to consider whether the transaction is good; the duty to impound attaches to the document.

Sub-section (2): the examination. He must examine every such instrument to ascertain whether it is stamped with a stamp of the value and description required by the law in force in the State when the instrument was executed or first executed. Note the date: the law at execution, matching section 2(d).

The proviso relieves a Magistrate or Judge of a Criminal Court from examining or impounding a document coming before him in a proceeding other than one under the chapters named, if he does not think fit to do so.

Section 34: inadmissibility, and the way out

The bar. No instrument chargeable with duty shall be:

• admitted in evidence for any purpose by any person having authority to receive evidence; or
• acted upon, registered or authenticated by any such person or by any public officer,

unless it is duly stamped, or, where written on impressed stamp paper, unless that stamp paper was purchased in the name of one of the parties to the instrument.

The width of the bar is the point: "for any purpose" and "acted upon" together mean the document is unusable, not merely unprovable.