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Forensic Science and Scientific Investigation of Crime
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LLM · Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration
2018 Examination
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LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Forensic Science and Scientific Investigation of Crime 2018 Question Paper with Solutions
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First published on munotes.in on 13 August 2026.
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Model answers written and edited by the munotes.in editorial desk.
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The University does not publish an official answer key for this paper. The answers in this volume are model answers, written to show how a full-mark answer is built. They are a study aid, not an authority on what an examiner marked.
The question paper reproduced here is the paper as set by the University of Mumbai at the 2018 examination.
The answers in this volume state the law as it stands today, not as it stood when each paper was set, and four changes alter answers throughout this folder. The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam came into force on 1 July 2024: section 176(3) of the Sanhita requires a forensic expert to attend the scene of every offence punishable with seven years or more, but only from a date each State notifies within five years. The DNA Technology (Use and Application) Regulation Bill, 2019 was withdrawn from the Lok Sabha in July 2023, so India has no DNA statute and no body that accredits a forensic laboratory. Kattavellai v. State of Tamil Nadu, 15 July 2025, now requires every sample to reach the laboratory within forty eight hours and a chain of custody register signed by each handler. And Amlesh Kumar v. State of Bihar, 10 June 2025, holds that an accused has no right to demand a narco-analysis test and that its findings can never be the sole basis of a conviction.
Contents
The questions below are the paper as the University of Mumbai set it at the 2018 examination, in the order it was set.
MarksPage
The Paper as Set
The questions in this volume are the questions asked at the 2018 examination, reproduced as the University of Mumbai set them, in the order it set them. Nothing has been reworded, added or left out. Only the answers are ours. See the original question paper.
Duration 3 hours · Total marks 100 · 14 questions answered
How to use this volume
Solve the paper first, under exam conditions and against the clock. Then read the answers here and mark your own. Reading a solution before attempting the question feels productive and teaches very little, because recognising an answer is not the same as being able to write one.
SECTION I
Q.P. Code 32879, the first paper. Attempt any four questions, all questions carry equal marks
any four of seven · 100 Marks
1.Write short notes: a) Forensic Biology & DNA. b) Forensic Documents.[25]
Answer
For full marks, cover: this paper prints no "any two", so both notes are compulsory and the marks divide evenly at about twelve and a half each. That is a full page and a half per note, not a paragraph. The discriminator in both is the same: name the tests or the instruments, and name the provision that lets the result into a trial. On the DNA half, the single most valuable thing you can say is that India has no DNA statute, because the 2019 Bill was withdrawn, and most candidates state that Bill as though it were law.
a) Forensic biology and DNA (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.
The serological sequence. For blood, the presumptive tests exploit the peroxidase-like activity of haemoglobin: the Kastle-Meyer phenolphthalein test, leucomalachite green and, for a scene that has been washed, luminol, which luminesces in darkness over blood diluted far beyond visibility. These exclude but do not establish, because plant peroxidases and rust give false positives. Confirmation is by the microcrystal tests, Teichmann for haemin and Takayama for haemochromogen, and species by the precipitin test, performed as gel diffusion or crossover electrophoresis, which disposes of the common defence that the blood was an animal's. For semen, the presumptive test is acid phosphatase and confirmation is by microscopic identification of spermatozoa, by the Florence and Barberio crystal tests, and by prostate specific antigen, which matters because it is detectable in a vasectomised or azoospermic man in whom no spermatozoa will be found. Saliva is identified by amylase.
DNA profiling: the science in outline. Human beings share about ninety-nine point nine per cent of their genomic sequence, and the variation used for identification lies in non-coding regions. Forensic profiling counts short tandem repeats, sequences of two to six base pairs repeated a variable number of times at each of an agreed set of loci, with the amelogenin locus included to indicate sex. The process runs: collection and preservation; extraction, with differential extraction used on sexual assault samples to separate the sperm fraction from the epithelial fraction; quantification; amplification of the target loci by the polymerase chain reaction in a thermal cycler; separation of the products by size on a capillary electrophoresis genetic analyser; comparison with a reference profile; and expression of the result as a random match probability.
Three variants matter. Autosomal STR profiling is the standard and the most discriminating. Y-STR profiling reads the male-specific chromosome and is used to find a male contributor in a female-dominated mixture, but it identifies a paternal lineage, so all males in that line share the profile. Mitochondrial DNA is present in many copies per cell and survives degradation, so it is used on old bone, teeth and hair shafts, but it identifies a maternal lineage.
The Indian legal position, which is where the marks are. There is no DNA statute in India. The DNA Technology (Use and Application) Regulation Bill, 2019, which would have created a DNA Regulatory Board, a national data bank and compulsory accreditation of laboratories, was introduced on 8 July 2019 and withdrawn from the Lok Sabha in July 2023.
The sample-taking powers therefore come from the criminal procedure statutes: s.51 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, whose Explanation defines the examination of an arrested person to include blood, blood stains, semen, swabs in sexual offence cases, sputum and sweat, hair samples and nail clippings by modern scientific techniques "including DNA profiling"; s.52 for a person arrested for rape; s.184 for the victim, within twenty-four hours and with recorded consent; and the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022, whose s.2(1)(b) brings biological samples and their analysis within "measurements", subject to the proviso to s.3 that a person arrested for an offence which is neither against a woman or a child nor punishable with seven years or more may not be obliged to give biological samples.
Admissibility is by s.39(1) of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, and in Pattu Rajan v. State of Tamil Nadu, (2019) 4 SCC 771 the Supreme Court held expressly that DNA evidence is itself opinion evidence and that the court is not bound by it, on the same footing as ballistics, fingerprints and handwriting. India's first judicial acceptance was Kunhiraman v. Manoj, II (1991) DMC 499, a Kerala maintenance case begun in 1988 and decided on profiling by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology at Hyderabad, where the High Court held DNA admissible as expert opinion in the same way as ballistic and fingerprint opinion.
The weakness is custody, not chemistry. In Rahul v. State of Delhi (NCT of Delhi), 2022 LiveLaw (SC) 926, samples in the Chhawla case lay in police custody for about two months without any recorded safeguard and the Supreme Court acquitted three men under sentence of death rather than act on the reports. In Kattavellai @ Devakar v. State of Tamil Nadu, 2025 INSC 845, decided on 15 July 2025, samples taken on 19 May 2011 reached the laboratory on 29 June 2011, a forty-one day gap the prosecution could not explain; the Court acquitted and issued binding nationwide directions requiring documented packaging, delivery to the laboratory within forty-eight hours with written reasons for delay, and a Chain of Custody Register signed by every handler and forming part of the trial record.
b) Forensic documents (about 12.5 marks)
What the discipline covers. Questioned document examination establishes the authorship, authenticity and history of a document. Its subject matter is handwriting and signatures; alterations, additions, erasures and obliterations; indented impressions; ink and paper; typescript, printing and photocopies; and the security features of currency, stamps and identity documents.
Handwriting comparison. The premise is that writing is a semi-automatic motor habit, individual to the writer and neither fully suppressible nor fully imitable. The examiner separates class characteristics, which reflect the copybook system the writer was taught and can only exclude, from individual characteristics, which identify: line quality, the smoothness and rhythm of the stroke, which is the most informative single feature; pen pressure and its patterned variation; pen lifts and hesitations; the manner of beginning and ending strokes; connecting strokes; letter proportions; slant; spacing; alignment to the baseline; and the design of particular letters.
Standards are everything. They must be adequate in number, contemporaneous with the disputed writing, and comparable, a signature being compared with signatures and not with running hand. Collected standards, written before the dispute arose in the ordinary course, cannot have been distorted for the purpose; requested standards, taken to dictation, allow the examiner to control the instrument, surface and text but are open to deliberate disguise, which is why they are taken repeatedly and at intervals. The power to demand them is s.349 of the Sanhita, under which a Magistrate of the first class may order any person, including an accused, to give specimen signatures or handwriting, and by a further proviso may do so even where the person has not been arrested, for reasons recorded in writing.
Forgery, by kind. A simple or spurious forgery makes no attempt to copy and shows the forger's own habits. A traced forgery, made through carbon, by indentation or against a light source, shows unnaturally slow and even line quality, tremor where a genuine writer accelerates, blunt starts and stops, and, decisively, exact superimposition on the model, which never occurs between two genuine signatures. A simulated or freehand forgery, produced by practice, is the hardest and betrays itself by poor line quality, retouching, and the forger's own habits surfacing in the inconspicuous parts of the writing.
The instruments. The video spectral comparator examines the document under ultraviolet, visible and infrared light and separates inks that appear identical in white light, revealing additions and alterations and often reading through an obliteration. The electrostatic detection apparatus develops indented writing, the impression left on the sheet below the one written on, which frequently establishes the order in which the pages of a document were prepared. The stereomicroscope determines which of two intersecting strokes was written first and reveals mechanical erasure by the disturbance of paper fibres. Thin layer chromatography separates the dyes in an ink and can show that two entries were made with different pens.
The law and the weight. Section 39(1) of the Sakshya Adhiniyam makes expert opinion on the identity of handwriting relevant; s.41 makes relevant the opinion of a person acquainted with another's handwriting; s.45 makes the grounds of the opinion relevant; and s.72 permits the Court itself to compare a disputed signature, writing or seal with one admitted or proved. On that last power, State (Delhi Administration) v. Pali Ram, (1979) 2 SCC 158 held that although there is no legal bar to a judge using his own eyes, prudence and caution require him to hesitate before basing on his own comparison alone a finding about a handwriting which is the sheet anchor of the prosecution case, and that the prudent course is to obtain the opinion and assistance of an expert.
On the expert's own weight, the Supreme Court has said two different things and the best answers give both. Magan Bihari Lal v. State of Punjab, (1977) 2 SCC 210 held that expert opinion must always be received with great caution, that it is unsafe to convict solely on it without substantial corroboration, and that this had almost become a rule of law. Murari Lal v. State of Madhya Pradesh, (1980) 1 SCC 704 held that there is no rule of law, nor any rule of prudence crystallised into a rule of law, that such opinion must never be acted on unless substantially corroborated; the approach must be one of caution, the reasons must be probed, and where they are convincing and nothing throws doubt on them the uncorroborated testimony of a handwriting expert may be accepted.
A point worth a mark on its own: the Government Examiner of Questioned Documents, with offices at Shimla, Kolkata and Hyderabad, is not named in the list of Government scientific experts in s.329(4) of the Sanhita and comes in, if at all, only through clause (g), which admits any other scientific expert specified by notification.
Conclusion. Forensic biology proceeds through the fixed sequence of whether material is biological, what it is, what species it came from and whose it is, using presumptive tests that exclude and confirmatory tests that establish, with DNA profiling by short tandem repeats now answering the fourth question; and its Indian legal position is unusual in that there is no DNA statute at all, the 2019 Bill having been withdrawn in July 2023, so the powers rest on ss.51, 52 and 184 of the Sanhita and on the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022, and the results are ordinary opinion evidence under s.39 of the Sakshya Adhiniyam by which, on Pattu Rajan, the court is not bound.
Questioned document examination establishes authorship and authenticity from line quality and the other individual characteristics of writing, compared against adequate contemporaneous standards obtainable under s.349 of the Sanhita, using the video spectral comparator, the electrostatic detection apparatus and the stereomicroscope; its opinion is relevant under s.39 and s.41, the court may itself compare under s.72 subject to the caution in Pali Ram, and the weight of the expert's opinion remains unsettled between Magan Bihari Lal and Murari Lal.
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