A disputed identity-card signature cannot serve as an admitted specimen for forensic comparison.

The complainant filed a prosecution under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, alleging that the respondent had borrowed ₹20 lakh and issued a cheque towards repayment.

The cheque was returned twice with the endorsement “signature differs.”

The respondent’s defence was that he had provided a blank cheque without signing it and that the complainant later forged the signature.

The complainant sought to have the signature on a photocopy of the respondent’s Voter Identity Card compared with the cheque signature by a forensic expert, relying on Sections 45 and 47 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872.

The Trial Court dismissed the application, and the Revisional Court affirmed that decision.

The complainant then challenged both orders under Section 528 of the BNSS.

Whether the photocopy of the Voter Identity Card, whose signature the respondent disputed, could be treated as an admitted signature and sent for forensic comparison with the disputed cheque signature.

Whether the High Court should interfere with the concurrent orders of the Trial and Revisional Courts in a petition that the Court considered a second revision in substance.

The petition invoked Section 528 of the BNSS and Sections 45 and 47 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, seeking forensic comparison and opinion concerning handwriting or signatures.

The Court’s reasoning proceeded on the principle that a signature disputed by the person to whom it is attributed cannot, merely because it appears on an identity document, be treated as an admitted signature for comparison.

It also stated that a petition challenging concurrent findings could not be permitted to operate as a second revision in substance.

The Court noted that the Trial Court had already allowed the cheque to be sent for forensic examination and had issued a subpoena to the bank for the respondent’s admitted signature.

The proposed comparator was only a photocopy, produced nearly seven years after the complaint was instituted; the respondent specifically denied that the signature on it was his.

In those circumstances, the Court held that the Voter Identity Card signature could not be treated as an admitted standard for comparison.

It also relied on the document’s belated production and the concurrent findings below in declining to interfere.

It held that the Trial Court was justified in refusing to send the photocopy for forensic comparison and that the Revisional Court had rightly affirmed that decision.

The Criminal Original Petition was dismissed, and the connected miscellaneous petition was closed.