Section 283(ii) in Police Regulations, Bengal , 1943
(ii)Anything which savours of oppression or trickery in obtaining a confession must be avoided. The aim of a police officer should be to obtain circumstantial and oral evidence so convincing that the accused person cannot escape. If he succeeds in obtaining such evidence, the confession will often follow and will materially strengthen the case, but to seek to obtain the confession first and the corroborative evidence afterwards is to reverse the proper order of proceedings. If, however, a confession is volunteered in an inquiry, every effort must be made to ascertain if there is evidence corroborative of any point in the confession which can he verified. A statement purporting to be a confession will often be made in order to mislead the inquiring officer, and such statements are very rarely true in all particulars, and also are frequently made in order to throw blame on other persons, or with a view to deter from further inquiry. Also they are generally retracted in Court, in which case, if they stand alone and uncorroborated, they have little or no probative value. There is thus every reason for testing so-called confessions very carefully and not accepting them as final and conclusive, and stopping the inquiry.
