An accused who has given his consent to the investigating agency to draw his voice samples cannot later back out on the ground that the text to be read out has words incriminating him, the Supreme Court held on Friday.
The apex court however held that to ensure fair process, the prescribed text need not contain entire sentences from the inculpatory text, but can use words drawn from the disputed conversation in order to meet the legitimate concern of the investigating authorities for making a fair comparison.
“A commonality of words is necessary to facilitate a spectrographic examination,” a Bench of Chief Justice of India T.S. Thakur and Justices A.M. Khanwilkar and D.Y. Chandrachud observed in their judgment on Friday.
The bench was deciding a plea made by Zee editor editor Sudhir Chaudhary and his then colleague Samir Ahluwalia against a February 2015 order of the Delhi High Court, ordering them to give their voice samples.
According to the FIR filed against the duo on October 2, 2012 by Rajiv Bhadauria of Jindal Steel Company Private Limited, they had demanded a sum of money to refrain from telecasting programmes on their television channel pertaining to the alleged involvement of a corporate entity in a wrongful activity pertaining to the allocation of coal blocks.
The two men were allegedly caught on camera in a sting operation. They were arrested on November 27, 2012.
The High Court had held that the accused could not back out from the exercise of giving their voice samples after voluntary consenting to it.
The accused had argued that they were being forced to testify against themselves in violation of their fundamental right under Article 20 (3) of the Constitution. To this, the High Court had responded that a voice sample was simply an identification data and not a testimony.
