Exclusive statutory procedure for Magistrate confessions makes oral proof inadmissible when the prescribed record is absent.

The Criminal Procedure Code, 1898 prescribes an exclusive procedure for recording confessions before a Magistrate under Sections 164 and 364, including explanation of voluntariness, recording, reading over and signing. Where a statute requires a confession to be proved in that manner, oral testimony cannot substitute for the statutory record. The Magistrate's oral evidence of an unrecorded confession was therefore inadmissible, and the accompanying memorandum had no independent significance once that evidence failed.

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Issues: Whether the oral evidence of a Magistrate as to a confession made to him during investigation was admissible when the confession was not recorded under the prescribed procedure of the Criminal Procedure Code, 1898.

Analysis: The statutory scheme of the Criminal Procedure Code, 1898, especially Sections 164 and 364, lays down a detailed and exclusive method for recording confessions by Magistrates during investigation and before inquiry or trial. The Court applied the settled principle that where a power is given to do a thing in a particular way, it must be done in that way or not at all. Construed together, the provisions conferring power on Magistrates also delimit that power, and the safeguards of explanation, voluntary nature, recording, reading over, and signing would be rendered ineffective if oral testimony were admitted in substitution for the statutory record. The oral testimony of the Magistrate, given outside the prescribed procedure, was therefore contrary to the scheme of the Code and inadmissible. The accompanying memorandum was of no independent significance once the oral evidence failed.

Conclusion: The oral evidence of the Magistrate was inadmissible, and the conviction based on it could not stand.

Ratio Decidendi: When a statute prescribes a specific manner for recording and proving a confession by a Magistrate, that procedure is exclusive and any confession sought to be proved outside it is inadmissible.

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