LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Forensic Science and Scientific Investigation of Crime 2019 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: both notes are compulsory here, so the twenty-five marks divide evenly and each note must be a proper page and a half. The two disciplines are easily confused and the examiner is watching for whether you can separate them. Forensic biology examines material taken from a body or a scene, and its practitioner is a scientist in a laboratory. Forensic medicine examines the body itself, living or dead, and its practitioner is a registered medical practitioner. Open each note by making that distinction, then give the tests or the procedures by name, then the statutory provision, then a decided case, then the limit.

a) Forensic biology (about 12.5 marks)

Definition and scope. Forensic biology is the branch of forensic science that examines material of biological origin, human, animal or plant, to answer a question in a legal proceeding. Its material is blood, semen, saliva, sweat, urine, hair, bone, teeth and tissue, and on the botanical and microbial side diatoms, pollen, spores and wood, together with the insects that colonise a body.

In a sexual offence, it identifies semen, first presumptively by the acid phosphatase test and then conclusively by the microscopic identification of spermatozoa, by the Florence test for choline and the Barberio test for spermine, and above all by prostate specific antigen, which is the test that matters in practice because it is detectable in the seminal fluid of a vasectomised or azoospermic man in whom no spermatozoa will be found and in whose case a microscopic examination alone would report a false negative.

In an offence of violence generally, it identifies saliva by the detection of amylase, on cigarette ends, bite marks, bottle rims, envelope flaps and cloth used as a gag, all of which are excellent sources of DNA; and it examines hair microscopically for whether it is human or animal, from what region of the body, whether it was shed naturally or pulled, and whether the root sheath is attached, which decides whether nuclear DNA can be obtained or only mitochondrial.

The law. The Serologist to the Government is a Government scientific expert under s.329(4)(f) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, and the Director, Deputy Director or Assistant Director of a Central or State Forensic Science Laboratory under clause (e), so their reports may be used as evidence; by the second proviso to s.330 no expert is called unless a party disputes the report. The opinion itself is relevant under s.39(1) of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023. Material is obtained under s.51 of the Sanhita, 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, and under ss.52 and 184 in rape cases.

b) Forensic medicine (about 12.5 marks)

Definition and the distinction to draw. Forensic medicine is the branch of medicine that applies medical knowledge and technique to the questions the administration of justice must answer. It is conventionally distinguished from medical jurisprudence, which runs the other way and concerns the legal duties, liabilities and privileges of the medical practitioner: consent, confidentiality, professional negligence and registration. Indian usage runs the two together and a candidate who notes the distinction and says that it is not rigidly observed will not be marked down.

What it examines. The identification of the living and the dead; the cause, manner and time of death; the interpretation of injuries, whether mechanical, thermal, chemical or from firearms; asphyxial deaths by hanging, strangulation, drowning and smothering; the medico-legal aspects of sexual offences; the medical aspects of poisoning, where it overlaps with toxicology; the estimation of age; and questions of mental capacity, including fitness to stand trial.

The statutory trigger. Section 194 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 requires the officer in charge of a police station who 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, to inform the nearest Executive Magistrate empowered to hold inquests, to proceed to the body in the presence of two or more respectable inhabitants of the neighbourhood, and to draw up a report of the apparent cause of death describing the wounds, fractures, bruises and other marks of injury and stating by what weapon or instrument they appear to have been inflicted.

Section 194(3) then requires the body to be forwarded for post-mortem examination where the case involves the suicide of a woman within seven years of her marriage; the death of such a woman in circumstances raising a reasonable suspicion, or where a relative so requests; any doubt about the cause of death; or any other case the officer thinks expedient. The singling out of the seven-year marriage cases reflects the fact that dowry death is the largest single category of Indian medico-legal work.

The defence may legitimately use it in the opposite direction, to prove that the injuries could not possibly have been so caused and thereby discredit the eyewitnesses. But unless the medical evidence rules out all possibility whatsoever of the injuries occurring as the eyewitnesses describe, their testimony is not to be rejected for inconsistency with it. To that must be added the general standard in Ramesh Chandra Agrawal v. Regency Hospital Ltd., (2009) 9 SCC 709: expert evidence is admissible only where the matter is outside the knowledge and experience of the lay person, and opinion evidence is advisory in nature, the court not being bound by it.

Conclusion. Forensic biology and forensic medicine answer adjacent questions from opposite ends. Forensic biology works on material separated from the body, proceeding through the fixed sequence of whether the material is biological, what it is, what species it is from and whose it is, using presumptive tests that exclude and confirmatory tests that establish, with the Rahul and Kattavellai line showing that its results survive only as long as the custody record does. Forensic medicine works on the body itself, its central operation being the medico-legal autopsy triggered by s.194 of the Sanhita, and its evidence is received under s.39 of the Sakshya Adhiniyam as ordinarily corroborative, displacing eyewitness testimony under Solanki Chimanbhai only where it excludes the eyewitness account altogether. Both disciplines produce statements of possibility rather than of fact, and the professional obligation in both is to state the range rather than the point.