Supreme Court: a charge can't be quashed by re-appreciating evidence at the discharge stage

The Supreme Court restored a criminal complaint against a neighbour accused of forging a building plan, setting aside a Bombay High Court order at Goa that had discharged her under Sections 468, 471 and 420 of the Indian Penal Code. A Magistrate had earlier framed charges against the accused, a decision an appellate court and, in an earlier round, a Division Bench of the High Court itself had declined to disturb. In a later writ petition, a Single Judge of the High Court re-appreciated the material on record and discharged the accused, holding the complainant's plan was not proved to be genuine. The Supreme Court held this was impermissible: at the stage of framing a charge under Section 227 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, a court may look only at the chargesheet's own documents, cannot sift the evidence to separate the credible from the doubtful, and must order a discharge only where that material, taken at face value, shows no offence at all; if it raises a grave suspicion, the accused must face trial.

The conclusion on whether to proceed cannot rest on suppositions, suspicions or conjectures unconnected to the material on record. Since the charge had already been upheld once on identical submissions, the Single Judge was not justified in reopening it. The complaint was restored for trial by the Magistrate, with all contentions left open for the parties.