Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh): The High Court principal seat on Thursday directed the chief secretary to constitute an independent committee of three senior scientific officers from different Forensic Science Laboratories outside Madhya Pradesh to find out the correctness and veracity of all the forensic reports placed before the courts in the last five years.
Further, the court ordered that no two scientific officers shall be from the same state.
The court was hearing a petition filed by a suspect in a criminal case challenging the forensic report.
The court issued directions after taking serious note of the submissions of the State Forensic Science Laboratory in-charge director, Dr Harsha Singh that the error may have occurred due to a cut-and-paste mistake, and therefore, the wrong name has been mentioned in the report under question.
The court observed, "If this explanation is to be accepted, then the cut-and-paste error can also be in regard to the numerals pertaining to the matching of DNA chromosomes."
"Thus, there is an acceptance that there is no credibility to the DNA reports conducted by the Forensic Science Laboratories in the State of Madhya Pradesh," the court order said.
A division bench comprising Justice Vivek Agarwal and Justice Vivek Jain directed that the state and the laboratories shall make available to the committee the slides that were prepared while issuing those reports, so that the committee may also cross-check the slides to ascertain whether the reports are correct or not.
"Let this 20 per cent sample checking be carried out within six months, for which the chief secretary shall constitute a committee within seven days," the court order said.
After noticing discrepancies in the forensic report, the court ordered that it would be appropriate for an independent enquiry committee to be constituted to examine all the reports prepared by different scientific officers/assistant chemical examiners in Madhya Pradesh that have been placed before the courts during the last five years, so that the said independent committee of scientists, not belonging to Madhya Pradesh but from some other state, may independently examine the correctness and veracity of such reports.
The court directed Dr Harsha Singh to file an appropriate affidavit after she sought permission to consult a biological expert and file a proper affidavit in the case.
