Voice Samples (Part II) : Is the Supreme Court Too Late to the Party?

Perhaps the Supreme Court did its best to balance the act of investigation and preservation of the rights of the accused, but several concerns have been overlooked. The same has been pointed out by Adv. Neeraj Aarora in a recent article on the subject. Experts around the world have contemplated voice spectrographs to be unreliable and full of lacuna. On one hand, there could be situations where the specimen voice is disguised so as to deceive the expert while on the other it is said that the auditory and spectrographic comparisons are subjective and may vary from expert to expert. But where this kind of forensic examination falters the most is the still unexplored territory of a comprehensive standard procedure / guiding framework to be followed by the experts which should be formulated by the Indian investigative agencies.

In 2007, The International Association of Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics took a resolution regarding the use of the auditory and visual spectrographic method in voice forensics and stated that “This technique is without scientific foundations and should not be used in forensic caseworks.” Unfortunately, the Supreme Court judgment is headed to escalate the use of a technique, which has long ago become obsolete.