"Are you a chemistry professor?" the judge asked.

"Yes," Mamta Pathak replied, clasping her hand in a respectful namaste.

Draped in a white sari, glasses perched on her nose, the retired college teacher stood before two judges in a courtroom in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, speaking as if delivering a forensic chemistry lecture.

"In the post-mortem," she argued, her voice trembling but composed, "it is not possible to differentiate between a thermal burn and an electric burn mark without proper chemical analysis."

Across the bench, Justice Vivek Agarwal reminded her, "The doctor who conducted the post-mortem said there were clear signs of electrocution."

It was a rare, almost surreal moment - a 63-year-old woman, accused of murdering her husband by electrocution, explaining to the court how acids and tissue reactions revealed the nature of a burn.

The exchange, caught on video during her April hearing, went viral in India and stunned the internet. But in the court, no amount of expert-like confidence could undo the prosecution's case - a spouse murdered and a motive rooted in suspicion and marital discord.

Last month the High Court dismissed Mamta Pathak's appeal and upheld her life sentence for the April 2021 murder of her husband, Neeraj Pathak, a retired physician.

While Pathak mounted a spirited, self-argued defence - invoking gaps in the autopsy, the insulation of the house, and even an electrochemical theory - the court found the circumstantial evidence conclusive: she had drugged her husband with sleeping pills and then electrocuted him.

In court, Mamta, a mother of two, had peered over a stack of overflowing case files, leafing through them before she grew animated.

"Sir, electric burn marks can't be distinguished as ante-mortem [before death] or post-mortem [after death]," she argued quoting from a forensics book.

"How did they [doctors] write it was an electric burn mark in post-mortem [report]?".

Microscopically,........

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