Bloody footprints led to the bathroom. The expert said: 3 differences don't matter.

Nine similarities. Three differences. The expert blamed the blood.

The bathroom floor was smeared red. Footprints — clear, deliberate — led from the body straight to the door. When the police took the accused man into custody, they pressed his feet into printer's ink and produced a set of impressions that would become the centrepiece of a murder trial.

The question that hung over the case was deceptively simple: could a man be convicted on the strength of footprints alone — especially when the science behind matching them was still being argued about in courtrooms across the country?

When the bathroom floor became evidence

The facts of Pritam Singh v. State of Punjab begin where most murder cases do: with a body. The deceased lay near the bathroom. Around the body, in blood, were footprints. They didn't wander — they moved with purpose, leading away from the victim and toward the bathroom.

Police investigators collected these impressions from the scene. Then they took impressions from the accused — using printer's ink on paper, the standard method at the time. The two sets were sent to a forensic expert.

What the expert found would shape the entire case. On the right foot, nine similarities between the bloodied print and the ink print. On the left foot, ten similarities. But there was a catch: on each foot, the expert also found three differences.

Why the expert wasn't worried about the differences

Three differences on each foot would, to a layperson, sound like a problem. If the prints were from the same person, shouldn't they match perfectly?

The expert had an answer. The medium made the difference. Blood, he explained, has a different density than printer's ink. When a foot presses into blood, the resulting impression spreads differently — the ridges appear wider, the spaces between them narrower. The three differences, he argued, were not real mismatches. They were artefacts of the medium — distortions caused by blood behaving differently than ink.

The prosecution presented this as strong evidence. The defence argued that three differences on each foot were too many to ignore.

What the court saw when it looked at the prints

The court did not simply accept the expert's word. It examined the prints itself — an unusual step that signals how central this evidence was to the case. After comparing the bloodied impressions with the ink impressions, the bench observed that the comparison "stood the test well."

That phrase — "stood the test well" — is worth pausing on. The court was not saying the science of footprint identification was infallible. It was saying that, in this specific case, the match was convincing enough to rely on. The nine and ten similarities, combined with the expert's explanation for the three differences, created a chain of reasoning the court found persuasive.

The conclusion was blunt: the foot impressions found in blood near the location of the incident were proved to be those of the accused.

The problem with treating footprints like fingerprints

But Pritam Singh did not settle the law on footprint evidence. That task fell to a later case: Mohd. Aman v. State of Rajasthan.

In Mohd. Aman, the court took a harder look at the science itself. The question was no longer whether a particular match was good enough. The question was whether footprint identification — as a field of forensic science — was reliable enough to be used as evidence at all.

The court's answer was cautious. It held that the science of identification of footprints is "not a well-established fully developed science."

That sentence matters. It means the court recognised that footprint matching does not have the same scientific foundation as fingerprint analysis (the study of unique ridge patterns on fingertips) or DNA testing (comparing genetic markers from biological samples). The methodology — comparing ridge patterns, measuring distances between features — had not been validated through the kind of rigorous, large-scale studies that would give it the status of a mature science.

But the court did not throw out footprint evidence entirely. Instead, it carved out a specific role for it.

What footprint evidence can — and cannot — do

The court in Mohd. Aman held that if the evidence is found satisfactory in any given case, it may be used "only to reinforce the conclusions as to identify the culprit already arrived at on the basis of other evidence."

This is a critical limitation. Footprint evidence, the court said, is corroborative — it can support other evidence — not standalone. It can strengthen a case that already has other evidence pointing to the accused. But it cannot, by itself, carry the weight of a conviction.

Think of it this way: if the only thing connecting a person to a crime scene is a footprint match, that case is weak. But if there is other evidence — an eyewitness, a confession, a motive — and the footprint match aligns with that evidence, then the footprint becomes a powerful reinforcement.

This distinction — between primary evidence and corroborative evidence — is the lasting legacy of Mohd. Aman. It is also the reason Pritam Singh remains good law. In Pritam Singh, the footprint evidence was not the only evidence. But it was strong enough, and the match was convincing enough, that the court could rely on it.

Why this distinction matters for every lawyer

For practitioners, the takeaway is practical. If you are prosecuting a case involving footprint evidence, you need two things: a convincing match, and other evidence to back it up. The footprint alone will not get you a conviction — but a footprint that "stood the test well," combined with other evidence, can be decisive.

If you are defending, the play is different. Your first line of attack is the science itself: the court in Mohd. Aman has already said it is not fully developed. Your second line is the match: were the prints taken properly? Were the comparisons done blind? Were the differences explained away or ignored? Your third line is the corroboration requirement: if the prosecution has no other evidence, the footprint cannot fill the gap.

THE PLAY: Footprint evidence can reinforce a conviction — but it cannot create one where none exists.

The prints that stayed

The bathroom floor was cleaned. The blood washed away. But the impressions — nine similarities, three differences, and an expert who blamed the medium — stayed in the record. They stood the test well enough to convict one man, and they stood the test of time well enough to shape how courts treat a science that was, and perhaps still is, not fully developed.