LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Forensic Science and Scientific Investigation of Crime 2016 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: two of the three, so each note carries about twelve and a half marks and needs a full page and a half. All three are written out below. Note A is the odd one in this folder: it is not a forensic technique at all but a problem of jurisdiction and coordination, and the marks are in the constitutional allocation and in the new offence provisions, not in a list of crimes that cross borders. Notes B and C are technical, and in both the discriminator is whether you name the tests or the physics rather than describing the field in general terms.

The Union has only limited entries to work with. Entry 8 of the Union List covers the Central Bureau of Intelligence and Investigation, and Entry 80 permits the extension of the powers and jurisdiction of the police of one State to another State, but only with the consent of that other State. That is the constitutional root of s.6 of the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946, under which the Central Bureau of Investigation cannot exercise powers in a State without that State's consent, and of the periodic withdrawal of general consent by States, which is the single largest practical obstacle to the investigation of inter-State offences.

How criminal procedure copes. The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 addresses the problem in three ways.

Registration. Section 173(1) provides that every information relating to the commission of a cognizable offence may be given, irrespective of the area where the offence is committed, orally or by electronic communication to an officer in charge of a police station, with electronic information taken on record on being signed within three days. That is the statutory zero first information report and the electronic first information report, and it means a victim need no longer be turned away for approaching the wrong police station, which used to defeat inter-State complaints at the first step.

Substantive law. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 has created two new offences aimed squarely at this problem. Section 111 makes organised crime an offence: any continuing unlawful activity, including kidnapping, robbery, vehicle theft, extortion, land grabbing, contract killing, economic offences, cyber-crimes and trafficking in persons, drugs, weapons or illicit goods, committed by a person or a group acting in concert, singly or jointly, as a member of or on behalf of an organised crime syndicate, by violence, threat of violence, intimidation, coercion or other unlawful means, to obtain direct or indirect material benefit including financial benefit.

The Explanation defines an organised crime syndicate as a group of two or more persons indulging in continuing unlawful activity. Section 112 creates the offence of petty organised crime, committed by a member of a group or gang, covering theft including trick theft, theft from vehicles and dwellings, cargo theft, pickpocketing, card skimming, shoplifting and theft from automated teller machines, and also snatching, cheating, unauthorised selling of tickets, unauthorised betting or gambling and the selling of public examination question papers, punishable with one to seven years. Section 113 covers the terrorist act.

The unresolved difficulty. Nothing in the above solves the central problem, which is that a State police officer has no power to act in another State except through that State's force. Investigation across State lines therefore proceeds by request and by courtesy, and where relations between the two governments are poor the request is not answered. The withdrawal of general consent under s.6 of the 1946 Act by several States has made the position worse for central investigation, and no constitutional amendment has been attempted.

B) Forensic biology (about 12.5 marks)

The discipline and its logic. Forensic biology examines material of biological origin, human, animal or plant, to answer a legal question, and it proceeds through four questions in a fixed order: is the material biological at all; what kind of material is it; from what species does it come; and whose is it. The first three belong to serology and the fourth, since the late 1980s, to DNA profiling. Reciting that sequence is the fastest way to show that you understand the discipline rather than merely recall its contents.

Saliva is identified by amylase and matters because it is deposited on cigarette ends, bite marks, bottle rims, envelope flaps and cloth used as a gag. Hair is examined microscopically for human or animal origin, region of the body, whether shed or pulled, and whether the root sheath is present, which determines whether nuclear or only mitochondrial DNA can be obtained.

Two applications worth naming. The diatom test distinguishes ante-mortem from post-mortem drowning: a person who drowns while alive inhales water containing these algae, which the circulation carries into the marrow of the femur and other distal bones, so their presence there supports drowning while their absence in a body recovered from water suggests it was placed there. Forensic entomology uses the succession of insect colonisation of a corpse to estimate the post-mortem interval where decomposition has defeated the medical estimates.

DNA in outline. Profiling counts short tandem repeats at an agreed set of loci, with the amelogenin locus indicating sex; the sample is extracted, quantified, amplified by the polymerase chain reaction, separated by capillary electrophoresis and reported as a random match probability. Y-STR profiling finds a male contributor in a female-dominated mixture but identifies a paternal lineage; mitochondrial DNA survives degradation but identifies a maternal lineage.

C) Applications of ultraviolet and infrared rays in crime detection (about 12.5 marks)

The physics, which must come first. Visible light occupies about 400 to 700 nanometres. Ultraviolet lies below, from about 10 to 400 nanometres, divided into UVA from 315 to 400, UVB from 280 to 315 and UVC from 100 to 280. Infrared lies above, from about 700 nanometres upwards, the near infrared being the region used for documents and the far infrared being thermal radiation.

Two distinct effects are exploited and confusing them is the commonest error. Fluorescence: a substance absorbs short-wavelength radiation and re-emits at a longer wavelength, so something invisible in white light glows under ultraviolet. Differential absorption and reflection: two substances that reflect visible light identically may absorb or reflect infrared quite differently, so an infrared-sensitive camera sees a contrast the eye cannot.

Infrared applications. Documents, the principal use: inks identical in white light frequently differ in the infrared, one absorbing and appearing black while the other is transparent and disappears, which reveals additions and alterations made later with a different pen and permits reading through an obliteration; infrared luminescence, illuminating with visible light and photographing in the infrared, separates inks that plain absorption cannot; and charred documents can sometimes be read, because carbonised ink and carbonised paper still differ in infrared reflectance.

Gunshot residue on dark or bloodstained clothing: soot and tattooing invisible on dark cloth are recorded clearly in the infrared, which matters because range determination depends on the residue pattern. Subcutaneous injury: near infrared penetrates the upper skin layers and reveals bruising not visible to the eye. Thermal imaging in the far infrared detects heat and is used for surveillance in darkness, for locating persons hiding or buried, for detecting recently disturbed ground and for identifying recently driven vehicles.

The instruments are the Wood's lamp and the alternate light source with matching viewing filters, the video spectral comparator, which applies both regions systematically to documents, and infrared and thermal cameras.

Conclusion. Inter-State crime is a problem of machinery rather than of substantive law: police and public order are State subjects under Entries 1 and 2 of List II, Entry 80 of the Union List permits extension of police powers only with the receiving State's consent, and s.6 of the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946 reproduces that limit; the Sanhita answers it through the area-blind first information report in s.173(1) and the flexible venue provisions in ss.197 to 201, and the Nyaya Sanhita answers it substantively through the new offences of organised crime in s.111 and petty organised crime in s.112, with CCTNS, the Inter-operable Criminal Justice System, NAFIS and the National Crime Records Bureau supplying the informational layer.

Forensic biology proceeds through the fixed four questions, using presumptive tests that exclude and confirmatory tests that establish, and its Indian weakness is custody rather than chemistry, as Rahul and Kattavellai show. Ultraviolet and infrared examination exploits fluorescence and differential absorption to make visible a contrast the eye cannot see, in body fluids, injuries, fingerprints, documents and gunshot residue, and its universal limitation is that a contrast is not an identification.