S.27 Evidence Act | Bar On Admissibility Of Confessional Statement Made To Police U/S 67 NDPS Act Lifted On Discovery Of Inculpatory Material: P&H High Court

Punjab and Haryana High Court recently held that Section 67 of the NDPS Act, does not expressly oust the clout of Section 27 of the Indian Evidence Act, and, as such saves its operation to offences constituted under the NDPS Act. The bench comprising Justice Sureshwar Thakur further noted that Section 67 of the NDPS Act begets no contradiction with either Section 25 or Section 27 of the Indian Evidence Act. The court noted that all confessional statements made to officers investigating offences would be hit by Section 25 of the Indian Evidence Act. A circumspect analysis of the provisions carried in Section 27 of the Act, makes a clear display that, when in pursuance to a confession or information received from an accused, especially during the course of his custodial interrogation, by a police officer, and, when thereafter the fact confessed or the information revealed by such accused person, to the police officer concerned, becomes discovered, thereupon the bar created against the inadmissibility of a bald confessional statement, as made to a police officer, by an accused, becomes lifted, or became relieved, and/or, in other words, the fact discovered in pursuance to a confessional statement, as made by an accused, rather during the course of his custodial interrogation, by the investigating officer, becomes both, admissible as well as relevant. Nonetheless, any incriminatory fact even if is in existence, in contemporaneity, to the making of a confessional statement, by the arrested person, and, it makes an inculpation against any other accused, wherefrom whom, the incriminatory fact or the recovered incriminatory psychotropic substance or narcotic drug, was earlier thereto or prior to the recovery happening at the site of crime, rather taken into possession, by the maker of the disclosure statement or by the arrested person, and, if the inculpation becomes linked to the person wherefrom whom the arrested person has assumed possession of the relevant seizure, as made from the arrested persons' alleged conscious and exclusive possession.