Certo Is this judgment real?
Beta, Supreme Court only. We check Supreme Court of India judgments only for now: a High Court citation reads "Not in our corpus", which never means it does not exist.

Supreme Court of India

RAGHBIR SINGH versus SIATE OF HARYANA

Decided
31 March 1980
Judges listed
V.R. KRISHNA IYER (as the open data lists them; this may not name the whole bench)
Disposal
Dismissed

Citations

Official
[1980] 3 S.C.R. 277 · 1980 INSC 60
Also cited as
  • (1980) SCC(CRI) 526 (3 citing judgments)
  • (1980) 3 SCC 70 (3 citing judgments)

Learned from how other judgments cite this one, in their text or in the official Supreme Court Reports' lists of cases they refer to: each is cited this way by at least two judgments, and at least twice as often as any other citation to this judgment in that report. We hold no commercial reporter's text, only these citation strings.

Not shown
1 other citation string that other judgments attach to this one, on evidence too thin or too divided to publish.

Cited by

Cited in 3 other Supreme Court judgments we hold.

Counted only in the Supreme Court judgments we hold whose text we could read, not in High Court judgments. We match each citation to a judgment automatically, so a citation we cannot match is not counted. "Cited" says only that a judgment refers to this one, not whether it followed, distinguished or overruled it.

The Court's text

Paragraphs from our copy of the Supreme Court Reports print, with the Court's own paragraph numbers, the printed page and, where printed, the margin letter. The Court did not number this judgment's paragraphs, so they are listed by page. Link to paragraph N with #para-N.

KRI•HNA IYER, J., The criminal scenario with a tragic'crescendo which has been unfurled in this Special Leave Petition starts with'a bunch of 'suspects' being brought up to the police postjwhich was'in charge of the petitioner, an Assistant Sub-Insp~ctor. A; case of theft in some officer's house had been reported to the police the previous night and so as part of the investigation the suspects were picked'up and suffered as part of the processlof 'investigation' severe flagellation. Chhabila, one of those so tortured, succumbed to his injuries. This · triggered off investigation into the murderous conduct of the investigator, the petitioner, and another. Medical examination revealed the cruel cause of death as asphyxiation. One of the injuries which, according to the doctor, made the deceased unconscious was torture on both the soles of the foot of the victim. A trial for murder fol· lowed, a conviction under s. 302 was entered and eventually the High Court confirmed the conviction and sentence of life imprisonment so far as the petitioner was concerned. ' A false explanation of suicidal hanging was set up by the police: officer-accused but this was rejected and eventually on a study of the circumstances· and the incontrovertible facts of flagellation and asphyxiation within ·police premises and the testimony of eyewitnesses about nocturnal detention;within)he police station and beating up of the victim, the courts below concurrently found the guilt of the petitioner proved beyond reasonable doubt. Strenuous submissions have been made to us by Shri Mulla to discredit the prosecution version of murder but we are not in the least convinced that there is any error in the appreciation or the conclusion.

pp. 277–278, margin G

We are deeply disturbed by the diabolical recurrence of police torture resulting in a terrible scarce in the minds of common citizens that their lives and liberty are under a new peril when the guardians of the law gore human rights to death. The vulnerability of human rights assumes a traumatic, torturesome poignancy when violent violation is perpetrated by the police arm of the State whose function is to protect the citizen and not to commit gr.uesome offences against them as has happened in this case. Police lock-up if reports in newspapers have a streak of credence, are becoming more and more awesome cells. This development is disastrous to our human rights awareness and humanist constitutional order.

p. 278, margin C

The State; at the highest administrative and political levels, we hope, will organise special strategies to prevent and punish brutality by police methodology. Otherwise, the credibility of the rule of law in our Republic vis-a-vis the people of the country will deteriorate.

p. 278, margin F

We conclude with the disconcerting note sounded by Abraham Lincoln:

p. 278, margin F

"If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." These observations have become necessary to impress upon;the State A police echelon.s the urgency of stamping out the:vice;or 'third degree' from the investigative armoury of the police. P. B. R • Petition dismissed.

pp. 278–279, margin F