LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Forensic Science and Scientific Investigation of Crime 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: the paper gives you a choice of two out of three, so each note you write is worth about twelve and a half marks and must be a proper short essay, not four lines. All three are set out below so that you are covered whichever pair you pick. The mark is lost in the same place every year: candidates describe the technique and stop. For each note, name the statutory provision the technique operates under, give at least one decided case, and say where the technique fails. On the lie detector in particular, the description of the instrument is worth very little and Selvi is worth almost everything.

The central operation of the subject is the medico-legal autopsy, which differs from a clinical autopsy in its purpose. A clinical autopsy asks what disease killed the patient. A medico-legal autopsy asks a legal question: was this death natural, accidental, suicidal or homicidal, what caused it, when did it occur, and does the body carry marks consistent with the prosecution's account of how it was inflicted. It is performed on the requisition of the investigating agency, not at the request of the family, and the family's consent is not required.

The statutory framework the medical witness works under

The trigger is s.194 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. Where the officer in charge of a police station receives information that a person has committed suicide, or has been killed by another, by an animal, by machinery or by an accident, or has died in circumstances raising a reasonable suspicion that another person has committed an offence, he must give intimation to the nearest Executive Magistrate empowered to hold inquests, proceed to the body in the presence of two or more respectable inhabitants of the neighbourhood, and draw up a report of the apparent cause of death describing the wounds, fractures, bruises and other marks of injury.

For the living, the Sanhita supplies a graded set of powers. Section 51 allows a registered medical practitioner, at the request of a police officer, to examine an arrested person where there are reasonable grounds to believe the examination will afford evidence of the offence, and the Explanation is where the modern content sits: "examination" includes the examination of blood, blood stains, semen, swabs in cases of sexual offences, sputum and sweat, hair samples and finger nail clippings by the use of modern and scientific techniques including DNA profiling. Section 52 governs the examination of a person arrested for rape, and requires the report to describe the material taken for DNA profiling. Section 53 requires every arrested person to be examined. Section 184 governs the examination of the victim of rape, requires her to be sent to the practitioner within twenty-four hours, requires her consent, and requires the report to record specifically that consent was obtained.

The weight of that evidence is settled by Solanki Chimanbhai Ukabhai v. State of Gujarat, (1983) 2 SCC 174. The accused was convicted on the evidence of eyewitnesses, and the defence argued that the injuries described by the doctor were inconsistent with the manner of assault the witnesses described. The Supreme Court held that ordinarily the value of medical evidence is only corroborative: it proves that the injuries could have been caused in the manner alleged, and nothing more. The defence may legitimately use it the other way, to prove that the injuries could not possibly have been caused as alleged and so discredit the eyewitnesses. But unless the medical evidence rules out all possibility whatsoever of the injuries occurring as the eyewitnesses describe, their testimony cannot be thrown out for inconsistency with it.

Where forensic medicine is weak

The estimates the discipline produces carry margins that are wider than the confident language of a post-mortem report suggests. Time since death derived from rigor mortis, post-mortem lividity, cooling and stomach contents is affected by ambient temperature, body mass, clothing, the last meal and the manner of death, and an honest range is often measured in hours rather than minutes. Age from ossification is an approximation and becomes unreliable above about twenty-five years. The autopsy surgeon in India almost never visits the scene, so the reconstruction is done from the body alone, without the context that would discipline it. And the volume of medico-legal work carried by district hospitals means that the examination is frequently conducted by a general duty medical officer with no specialist training in the subject.

The important point for a law paper is that a sniffer alert is a screening result and not proof of anything. It generates the reasonable suspicion that justifies a search and the seizure of exhibits, and those exhibits then go to the explosives division of a Central Forensic Science Laboratory for confirmatory analysis by gas chromatography with mass spectrometry or by high performance liquid chromatography. It is the confirmatory laboratory result, spoken to by a witness who can be cross-examined, that reaches the court. The Chief Controller of Explosives is a Government scientific expert named in s.329(4)(b) BNSS, so that report has the benefit of the section.

BNSS s.176(3) is now the provision that matters most at a blast scene. On information of an offence punishable with seven years or more, the officer in charge of the police station must, from such date as the State Government notifies within five years, cause a forensic expert to visit the crime scene to collect forensic evidence and cause videography of the process. A post-blast scene is the paradigm case for the sub-section, because the evidence is microscopic residue that degrades and is destroyed by the rescue operation itself.

iii) Lie detector test

The polygraph records several physiological correlates of arousal at once: respiration through pneumograph tubes across the chest and abdomen, cardiovascular activity through a blood pressure cuff, and electrodermal activity, the galvanic skin response, through electrodes on the fingers. Questions are put in structured formats, of which the best known are the relevant and irrelevant technique, the control or comparison question test, and the guilty knowledge or concealed information test, the last of which asks about details only the offender would know rather than asking directly whether the subject is lying.

The premise, and the flaw, should be stated plainly because the marks are there. The instrument measures arousal. It does not measure deception. There is no physiological signature unique to lying. An innocent subject who is frightened of the machine, of the police, or of the consequences of an inconclusive result produces the pattern the examiner reads as deception, and a practised or unemotional subject produces the pattern read as truth. The guilty knowledge test is scientifically the most defensible of the formats because it does not depend on that inference at all, but it is usable only where the investigation has held back a detail that has not leaked.

What may be admitted is any information or material subsequently discovered with the help of a voluntarily administered test, and that comes in under s.27 of the Evidence Act, now the proviso to s.23(2) of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023: where a fact is deposed to as discovered in consequence of information received from an accused in police custody, so much of the information as relates distinctly to the fact discovered may be proved. The Court further directed that the National Human Rights Commission's Guidelines for the Administration of Polygraph Test (Lie Detector Test) on an Accused, 2000 be strictly followed, and extended those safeguards to narco-analysis and to the brain electrical activation profile.

Amlesh Kumar v. State of Bihar, 2025 INSC 810, decided on 10 June 2025 by Karol and Varale JJ, is the current statement and was handed down ten months before this paper was sat. The Patna High Court had, on 9 November 2023, permitted narco-analysis of all the accused during investigation in a dowry matter. The Supreme Court set that order aside, holding that no individual may be forcibly subjected to such a test, that an accused has no indefeasible right to demand one either but may apply to the court which must weigh the totality of the circumstances, and that the findings of such a test cannot form the sole basis of conviction.

Conclusion. All three techniques are useful and none of them is proof. Forensic medicine tells the court what was possible and, more powerfully, what was impossible, and under Solanki Chimanbhai it displaces eyewitness testimony only when it excludes the eyewitness account altogether. The portable bomb sniffer is a screening instrument whose legal work is to generate the suspicion that justifies a search, with the confirmatory laboratory analysis carrying the evidential weight. The lie detector produces nothing admissible at all: after Selvi, and now Amlesh Kumar, the test cannot be compelled, its results are inadmissible even on consent, and the only thing that survives into the trial is a discovery made in consequence of it under the proviso to s.23(2) of the Sakshya Adhiniyam.