In cases relating to bribery, sometimes in order to entrap the persons receiving the bribe, the persons offering the bribe produce currency notes before the police authorities or Executive Magistrates.
After some marks are made on the currency notes, the same are handed over to the person receiving bribe and he is entrapped and caught. In some cases, the Police Officers and Executive Magistrates themselves provide such money.
The point for consideration is whether the evidence of the witnesses of the raiding party and the Officers is to be treated as that of accomplices.
The persons who under compulsion offer money to the person rei giving bribe cannot be said to be accomplices. They are in the nature of only partisan or interested witnesses.
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Their evidence cannot be rejected on the ground of absence of independent corroboration. Their evidence has to be judged by the same standard as the evidence of other partisan or interested witnesses.
The inexpediency of employing Magistrates as trap witness has been stressed upon in various cases. In Brannan vs. Peek 1947(2) All E.R. 572; Goddard, C.J. made the following observations:-
“I hope the day is far distant when it will become a common practice in this country for police officers to be told to commit an offence themselves for the purpose of getting evidence against someone”.
This point was again stressed upon in Ramjanam Singh vs. The State of Bihar, (1956 SC 643 at 651). It was observed therein thus:
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“The very best of men have moments of weakness and temptation, and even the worst, times when they repent of an evil thought and are given an inner strength to set Satan behind them; and if they do, whether it is because of caution, or because of their better instincts or because some other has shown them either the futility or the wickedness of wrong doing it behaves society and the state to protect them and help them in their good resolve, not to place further temptation in their way and start afresh a train of criminal thought which had been finally set aside.”
The inexpediency of employing Magistrates as trap witnesses cannot be resolved into an inflexible rule that their evidence should be totally rejected in the absence of independent corroboration.