The Supreme Court has reaffirmed the Panchsheel Test for establishing circumstantial evidence in Shail Kumari vs The State Of Chhattisgarh delivered on 6 August 2025. A bench of Justices B.R. Gavai and K. Vinod Chandran allowed the present appeal and found the Trial Court’s decision based on conjectures and surmises.
The appellant was alleged to have drowned her two children as per circumstantial evidence. The Court referred to the ratio in Shivaji Sahabrao Bobade v. State of Maharashtra wherein the five tests for proof of circumstantial evidence was put forward: (1) the accused must be proven guilty and not on conjectures, (2) established facts must be consistent with guilt of the accused, (3) the evidence needs to be of conclusive nature, (4) all other possible hypothesis needs to be removed from speculation and lastly, (5) the chain of evidence must not carry reasonable doubts.
This is a precedence in appellate reversal of lifetime imprisonment conviction on account of insufficient evidence. The bench found no link between the appellant and the crime in question and the testimony to be highly unreliable and hearsay evidence. The three kinds of witness classification in the case of Vadivelu Thevar was referred to:(i) wholly reliable, (ii) wholly unreliable, and (iii) neither wholly reliable nor wholly unreliable.
The law laid down in Sharad Birdhichand Sarda requires the prosecution to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt to demonstrate a chain of circumstances that is so inextricably connected to exclude all other possible deviations from the truth alleged. The Court found no such connections in the present appeal. Therefore, the impugned judgement by the Trial Court dated 18th June 2004 was quashed and set aside.
