'Intent to Wreak Vengeance' — Allahabad HC Discards Dying Declaration, Acquits Husband and In-Laws in 2017 Dowry Death Case (Mahnaz v. State of UP)

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Overview

The Allahabad High Court has set aside a life-sentence conviction and acquitted a husband and four in-laws in a 2017 murder and dowry-death case, holding that the sole dying declaration on which the trial court had convicted them was unreliable — both because its medical foundation was never established and because its sweeping, unparticularised allegations against the entire matrimonial family suggested an intent “more to wreak vengeance … than to state the truth.”

Case: Mahnaz and Another v. State of U.P. and Connected Appeals
Citation: 2026 LiveLaw (AB) 376 — Neutral Citation 2026:AHC:132590-DB
Bench: Justice Ajay Bhanot and Justice Divesh Chandra Samant
Date: 7 July 2026

Facts

According to the prosecution’s case, the deceased had been subjected to persistent harassment over an unmet dowry demand of ₹1 lakh and a motorcycle. The FIR — lodged by the deceased’s mother — alleged that on 19 February 2017, her brother-in-law flung her to the ground, her husband’s sisters bound her hands, and her husband, Khalid, poured kerosene oil on her and set her on fire inside her matrimonial home. The FIR further alleged that the accused locked the door from outside and that she was taken to hospital only afterwards, in order to create an alibi.

At trial, the deceased’s mother (the informant), father, and brother — the principal witnesses of fact — all resiled from the prosecution’s version and were declared hostile. With no surviving direct evidence, the trial court convicted all five accused — Mahnaz, Jayara @ Shayara Bano, Rashid, Khalid, and Shabnam — under Section 302 read with Section 149 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (IPC), and sentenced them to life imprisonment. The conviction rested almost entirely on a dying declaration recorded by a Naib Tehsildar shortly after the incident.

On appeal, the accused pointed to a second dying declaration — recorded by the Investigating Officer before the deceased succumbed to her injuries — which the prosecution had never placed on the trial record. They argued that its unexplained suppression entitled them to an adverse inference against the prosecution.

What the Court Held

1. A dying declaration requires proof of the declarant’s expectation of imminent death. The Bench held that a statement cannot be treated as a dying declaration merely because its maker later dies. It observed: “Expectation of imminent death and extinguishment of hopes to survive induced by the grievous nature of injuries or parlous medical condition of the person are the prerequisites of bringing the statement of such person within the fold of a dying declaration. Imaginary fears of death which do not have any medical basis cannot be invoked to qualify a statement as a dying declaration.”

2. No medical foundation was established. The prosecution had failed to produce the bed-head ticket, the medical case sheet, or the doctors who treated the deceased, and the post-mortem report did not record the percentage of burn injuries sustained. The Court found it could not determine whether the injuries were grave enough to induce a genuine expectation of death, holding that “the conditions precedent for treating statement of the deceased as a dying declaration have not been established by the prosecution.”

3. The declaration’s sweeping, unparticularised allegations undermined its credibility. The statement implicated every member of the matrimonial family without assigning any of them a specific role in the incident. The Bench found this suspicious rather than merely vague: “The failure to provide relevant details and assign particular roles to accused persons dents the credibility of the dying declaration. It appears that the intent of the dying declaration is more to wreak vengeance on the husband and his family than to state the truth.”

4. A material internal contradiction. The deceased had stated she did not know who took her to the hospital — a claim contradicted by the FIR and by the prosecution’s own witnesses, all of whom said it was her husband and his family who rushed her there. Since she was found to be conscious when she made the statement, the Court treated this inconsistency as significant.

5. Suppression of the second dying declaration drew an adverse inference. The prosecution offered no cogent explanation for withholding the statement recorded by the Investigating Officer. The Court held the pre-conditions for an adverse inference under Section 114(g) of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 were satisfied, and drew the inference that the withheld statement would have been unfavourable to the prosecution’s case.

6. Hostile witnesses and the husband’s conduct pointed away from guilt. The witnesses who turned hostile had also testified that the deceased was of a temperamental disposition and prone to suicidal tendencies, and the surrounding circumstances did not rule out suicide or an accidental fire. The Bench separately noted that the husband had rushed his wife to hospital and promptly informed her family — conduct it described as appearing bona fide.

7. The alternative charges also failed, and the appeals were allowed. Having discarded the dying declaration, the Court found no independent evidence to sustain the alternative charges under Sections 304-B (dowry death) and 498-A (cruelty) of the IPC, or under Sections 3 and 4 of the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961. Calling the trial court’s verdict “perverse and contrary to the evidence on record,” the High Court allowed all the connected appeals, set aside the conviction, acquitted Mahnaz, Jayara @ Shayara Bano, Rashid, Khalid, and Shabnam of all charges, and discharged their bail bonds.

The Law on Dying Declarations

A dying declaration is a recognised exception to the general rule against hearsay. Under Section 32(1) of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 (IEA) — the statute that governed both the trial and this appeal, since the incident occurred in 2017 — a statement made by a person as to the cause of their death, or as to any circumstance of the transaction resulting in their death, becomes a relevant fact once the cause of that person’s death is in question. For matters arising on or after 1 July 2024, the equivalent provision is Section 26 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA).

The evidentiary weight such a statement can bear has long been settled by the Supreme Court. In Khushal Rao v. State of Bombay, [1958] SCR 552, the Court held that it cannot be laid down as an absolute rule of law that a dying declaration must be corroborated before it can sustain a conviction — a truthful and voluntary dying declaration can, by itself, support one. But the same judgment also fixed the safeguards a court must apply before extending that trust to an out-of-court statement made without oath or cross-examination: the declarant must have been of sound and conscious mind, must have had a genuine opportunity to observe and identify the persons named, and the statement must be free of tutoring or ulterior motive, and consistent if repeated. It was against this two-limbed inquiry — first, whether the medical and factual foundation for treating a statement as a dying declaration exists at all, and second, whether its contents can be trusted — that the Bench in Mahnaz tested the prosecution’s case, and found it wanting on both counts.

Takeaway

The decision is a reminder that a dying declaration is not self-proving merely because the person making it later died. Two features of the reasoning stand out. First, the Court insisted on an evidentiary foundation for the declarant’s medical condition — absent records showing the gravity of the injuries, a court cannot infer that the declarant genuinely believed death was imminent, which the Bench treated as a threshold requirement rather than a mere formality. Second, the Court treated the shape of the allegation itself as a credibility marker: a statement that names every relative in the household without distinguishing what each of them supposedly did was found, on the facts of this case, more consistent with a desire to implicate the whole family than with a truthful, contemporaneous account. Combined with the prosecution’s unexplained suppression of a second, potentially exculpatory dying declaration, these gaps proved fatal once the sole plank of the conviction gave way.

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