Admissibility of Confessional FIR: Section 25 IEA & BSA

The Confessional FIR Filed by the Accused: A Problem in Evidence

The problem before us is a deceptively simple one that leads into some of the most contested territory in the Indian law of evidence. A — having killed his aunt with an axe — walks to the police station, gives an FIR narrating the act of killing in graphic detail, and thereby sets the criminal law in motion against himself. The dead body and the blood-stained axe are recovered from his house on the strength of the information in that FIR. There is no other evidence of any kind. The prosecution now seeks to rest a conviction for murder entirely on the contents of A's own FIR. The question is: can it do so?

The answer, as the Supreme Court conclusively settled in Aghnoo Nagesia v. State of Bihar (AIR 1966 SC 119), is this — the confessional FIR filed by the accused is hit in its entirety by Section 25 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 (Section 23(1) of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023), and no part of it can be proved against the accused by the prosecution except: (i) the formal parts identifying him as the maker of the report, and (ii) such portions as fall within the purview of Section 27 of the Evidence Act (the proviso to Section 23, BSA, 2023) by reason of leading to the discovery of a fact.

The Nature of A's FIR: A Confession

The first inquiry is whether A's FIR amounts to a confession in the legal sense. Lord Atkin's celebrated formulation in Pakala Narayana Swami v. Emperor (AIR 1939 PC 47) — approved by the Supreme Court in Palvinder Kaur v. State of Punjab (AIR 1952 SC 354) — lays down the governing test: a confession must either admit in terms the offence, or at any rate substantially all the facts which constitute the offence. A's FIR states that he hanged his aunt to death with an axe and that the dead body lies at his home. This is a statement that directly and in categorical terms admits all the essential facts constituting the offence of murder — the act, the instrument, the victim, and the result. There is nothing self-exculpatory in it; there is no attempt to throw the blame on another or to introduce a version that would negative guilt. This is, without any shadow of doubt, a plenary confession in the precise sense recognised by Indian law.

Compare this with the FIR in Faddi v. State of Madhya Pradesh (AIR 1964 SC 1850), where the accused himself filed an FIR stating that he found the dead body of his stepson in a well — a statement designed to deflect suspicion. The Supreme Court held in Faddi that that FIR was not a confession because it contained self-exculpatory matter — it placed the dead body in the well without acknowledging that the accused had put it there. It was, therefore, an admission of certain facts relevant to the inquiry, admissible under Section 21 of the Evidence Act. In A's case, there is no such exculpatory element. A says plainly: I hanged my aunt to death with an axe. The FIR is therefore a confession, not merely an admission, and the distinction matters enormously.

Section 25, Evidence Act / Section 23(1), BSA: The Absolute Bar

Section 25 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 provides: "No confession made to a police officer shall be proved as against a person accused of any offence." The corresponding provision under the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 is Section 23(1), which maintains the identical substantive position. The bar is absolute. It does not matter that:

The accused came to the police station voluntarily
The investigation had not yet commenced when the FIR was given
The confession was not extorted — it was entirely voluntary
The police played no role in inducing the statement

Section 25 bars all confessions made to a police officer, regardless of whether the accused was in custody at the time, regardless of whether the confession was freely made, and regardless of whether the investigation had begun. This position was definitively settled by the Supreme Court in Aghnoo Nagesia, where the Court said in terms:

"It covers a confession made when he was free and not in police custody, as also a confession made before any investigation has begun. The expression 'accused of any offence' covers a person accused of an offence at the trial whether or not he was accused of the offence when he made the confession."

The policy rationale is one of public welfare: the legislature, conscious of the historical practice of police officers using the third degree to extort confessions, drew an absolute line. A voluntary confession to the police is treated as presumptively tainted, not because the police in a particular case acted improperly, but because the law draws a prophylactic rule that tolerates no exception other than those expressly created.

The Aghnoo Nagesia Case: Directly in Point

The facts of Aghnoo Nagesia are almost identical to the problem at hand — and this is not coincidental, because the problem appears to be drawn directly from that case. In Aghnoo Nagesia, the accused went to the police station on the morning of August 11, 1963, and gave a detailed FIR in which he narrated, step by step, how he had killed his aunt Ratni, her daughter Chamini, her son-in-law Somra, and Somra's young son — all with a tangi (an axe-like weapon). The FIR was an extended statement of 18 parts, narrating the motive, the acts of killing, the concealment of the bodies, the hiding of the tangi, and a prior confession to his uncle. The Sub-Inspector then arrested the accused, recovered the dead bodies and the blood-stained tangi at his instance, and the prosecution sought to prove the entire FIR against the accused.

The High Court admitted parts of the FIR, applying a "separability test" — separating the FIR into confessional parts (which it excluded) and non-confessional parts relating to motive, preparation, and movement (which it admitted). The Supreme Court emphatically rejected this approach and declared:

"We think that the separability test is misleading, and the entire confessional statement is hit by Section 25 and save and except the formal part identifying the accused as the maker of the report, no part of it could be tendered in evidence."

The Court's reasoning was compelling. A confession, it held, is not merely the isolated sentence of admission but the confessional statement as a whole — each part of it, including the motive, preparation, opportunity, and concealment, is integrally part of the confession and shares its tainted character. To separate out the motive-narration or conduct-narration from the confession and admit it independently would be to gut the policy of Section 25 and rob it of its protective content.

The Separability Test Rejected: The Taint Rule

The principle that emerged from Aghnoo Nagesia may be stated thus: when the FIR as a whole is a confession, every part of it — motive, preparation, opportunity, the act, the concealment, the subsequent conduct — shares the taint of the confession. No severance is permissible. No surgical extraction of the non-confessional portions is allowed, for the simple reason that in a confessional FIR, every admission of an incriminating fact is made as part of a single continuous act of self-incrimination. To split it would be to allow the prosecution to benefit indirectly from evidence which the law has declared inadmissible.

As the Court held: "If the confession is tainted, the taint attaches to each part of it. It is not permissible in law to separate one part and to admit it in evidence as a non-confessional statement."

This is the central evidentiary proposition governing the problem of A's FIR.

What Can Be Proved: The Three Permissible Exceptions

The exclusion under Section 25, however, is not total in the sense of leaving the prosecution with nothing. Three categories of material from A's confessional FIR remain admissible:

First: The Formal Parts Identifying the Maker

The formal portions of the FIR — that A came to the police station, that A gave the report, that A affixed his thumb-impression — may be proved. These parts do not constitute a confession; they merely prove that A is the person who lodged the report. This limited admissibility serves to establish that it was A himself who set the criminal law in motion by going to the police station. It goes to A's conduct under Section 8 of the Evidence Act (Section 7, BSA, 2023): the act of lodging an FIR is a relevant fact as it is the conduct of the accused immediately after the alleged commission of the offence.

Second: The Discovery of Facts under Section 27 / Proviso to Section 23, BSA

Section 27 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 (the proviso to Section 23, BSA, 2023) creates an important exception: when any fact is discovered in consequence of information received from a person accused of an offence while in the custody of a police officer, so much of the information as distinctly relates to the fact discovered may be proved.

In A's case, the dead body and the blood-stained axe were recovered from A's house on the strength of the information given in the FIR. Two points arise here:

First, Section 27 requires the accused to be "in the custody of a police officer" at the time the information is given. The Supreme Court in Aghnoo Nagesia itself addressed this: the Sub-Inspector stated that he arrested the accused after the FIR was given. Prima facie, the accused was not in custody when the FIR was lodged. However, as the Court recognised, following the principle in State of U.P. v. Deoman Upadhyay (AIR 1960 SC 1125), once a person goes to the police and gives information leading to a discovery, he may be deemed to have submitted himself to the custody of the police officer constructively. This point was noted but left open in Aghnoo Nagesia itself, with the Court stating: "Prima facie, therefore, the appellant was not in the custody of a police officer when he gave the report, unless it can be said that he was in constructive custody."

Secondly, to the extent the FIR contained information that led to the discovery of the dead body and the blood-stained axe, that portion — and only that portion which distinctly relates to the fact discovered — becomes admissible. The Privy Council in Pulukuri Kottaya v. Emperor (AIR 1947 PC 67) settled that Section 27 admits only so much of the information as distinctly relates to the fact discovered. The prosecution can therefore prove: that A's statement led the police to the house, that from that house the dead body and the axe were recovered, and that the axe was blood-stained. This evidence goes not to the content of the confession but to the fruit of the information — the corpus delicti itself.

Third: Conduct under Section 8 / Section 7, BSA

Section 8 of the Evidence Act (Section 7, BSA) makes the conduct of a party, before or after the occurrence, relevant when it refers to any fact in issue or relevant fact. The fact that A went to the police station and lodged an FIR is a piece of conduct — it is the behaviour of a man immediately after his alleged commission of the offence. While the content of the FIR (the confession) cannot be proved, the fact of the FIR being lodged by A can be proved as conduct relevant under Section 8. This may be used not as proof of guilt but as a relevant circumstance in the chain of evidence.

Can the Prosecution Secure a Conviction?

The prosecution's case, as stated in the problem, rests entirely on "A's version contained in the First Information Report." The prosecution seeks to use the confession itself as the instrument of conviction. This contention is legally untenable. Under the settled law of Aghnoo Nagesia, the confessional FIR cannot be used against A as substantive evidence. The prosecution cannot pick up A's own words of self-incrimination and lay them before the court as proof of guilt.

However, the evidence available to the prosecution — if properly marshalled — is not nothing:

The discovery of the dead body from A's house, pursuant to A's information, is admissible under Section 27 and establishes the corpus delicti.
The blood-stained axe recovered from A's house similarly becomes admissible to the extent it was discovered in consequence of A's information.
The fact that A lodged the FIR himself is admissible as conduct under Section 8.
The axe may be subjected to forensic examination to establish that the blood on it matches the deceased's blood group.
Medical evidence of the cause of death can independently establish that Amritpal died as a result of injuries caused by the axe.

The cumulative effect of these pieces of evidence — the dead body at A's home, the blood-stained axe at A's home, the fact that A himself reported the crime — may, in appropriate circumstances, form a chain of circumstantial evidence sufficient to sustain a conviction, applying the panchsheel of Sharad Birdhi Chand Sarda v. State of Maharashtra (AIR 1984 SC 1622). But the conviction, if it comes, must rest on the discovered facts and the circumstantial evidence, not on the confession embedded in the FIR. The confession itself must be kept out.

Critically, A's failure to offer any explanation under Section 313 of the CrPC (Section 351, BNSS, 2023) — if that is the case — as to how a dead body came to be in his home, or how a blood-stained axe came to be in his possession, would itself be a strong circumstance against him. As was recognised in G. Parshwanath v. State of Karnataka (AIR 2010 SC 2914), the unexplained presence of the body and the weapon in the accused's house, coupled with the accused's failure to offer any explanation, strengthens the circumstantial case considerably.

The Position Under BSA, 2023

Under the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, the position is substantively unchanged. Section 23(1) of the BSA replaces Section 25 of the Evidence Act and carries forward the absolute bar against proving a confession made to a police officer. The proviso to Section 23 corresponds to Section 27 of the Evidence Act and preserves the discovery doctrine. Section 7 of the BSA replaces Section 8 of the Evidence Act on the relevance of motive, preparation, and conduct.

Decision

The prosecution's contention that a conviction can be secured solely on the basis of the confessional FIR is legally unsound and must fail. The FIR, being a confession made to a police officer, falls squarely within the absolute bar of Section 25 of the Indian Evidence Act (Section 23(1), BSA, 2023). Following the binding authority of Aghnoo Nagesia v. State of Bihar, the entire FIR — in all its parts — must be excluded from evidence as against A, save only for: (a) the formal parts establishing that A was the maker of the report, (b) such portions as led to the discovery of the dead body and the axe under Section 27, and (c) the fact of lodging the FIR as conduct under Section 8.

If the prosecution can build a case on these permissible fragments — the discovered dead body, the blood-stained axe, the forensic evidence, the medical evidence, the conduct of A in reporting the crime, and the absence of any innocent explanation by A under Section 313 — a conviction may still be possible. But it will be a conviction resting on circumstantial evidence properly assembled, not on the words of A's confession. The confession itself must be treated as though it were never spoken in a court of law.