Six years jailed on surmise: Supreme Court makes Uttar Pradesh pay an acquitted undertrial Rs 6 lakh

Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice K. Vinod Chandran read the Agra trial court acquittal they had ordered expedited, found no evidence against the accused, and directed compensation within a month with a copy to the DGP.

A man who spent six years in an Uttar Pradesh prison as an undertrial, in a kidnapping and murder case that produced six prosecution witnesses and not one proved circumstance, will receive Rs 6,00,000 from the State within a month. The Supreme Court ordered the payment on 26 October 2026 while disposing of what had begun as a bail petition. Justice K. Vinod Chandran, writing for himself and Justice J.B. Pardiwala, opened the judgment by calling it “a classic case of how an investigation should not be proceeded with”. The bench had earlier directed the Agra trial court to finish the trial in three months. The trial ended in acquittal. The Court then called for the acquittal judgment, read it in translation, and decided that what it found there required more than a routine disposal. A copy of the order goes to the Director General of Police and the Home Secretary of Uttar Pradesh.

From a bail petition to the acquittal judgment

The petitioner, Arun alias Deepak, had been in custody since 14 November 2019 in FIR No. 367 of 2019 registered at Police Station Achhnera, District Agra, under Section 364 read with Sections 302 and 201 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860. When his special leave petition for bail came before the Supreme Court, the bench noted that the case hinged entirely on circumstantial evidence and that he had been in jail for over six years. By order dated 23 March 2026 it directed the trial court to complete the trial within three months.

Even at that first stage the record had troubled the Court. The petitioner was never named in the FIR or in any statement under Section 161 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. He had been arrayed as an accused on the strength of CCTV footage in which he was said to appear, and the confession of a co-accused. The recovery was said to have been made jointly by the two accused, and what was recovered was charred bones, never identified as those of the missing man. The post-mortem was not conclusive about how death was caused.

When the Court was told the trial had concluded in acquittal, it asked for the judgment. It was in Hindi, ran to more than 100 pages, and had to be translated. On reading the translation, the bench said it was appalled at the manner in which the investigation had been carried out.

Six witnesses and what each of them said

The prosecution examined only six witnesses: the informant, a doctor, a head constable, a sub-inspector, a circle officer who was the investigating officer, and one independent witness.

PW1, the informant, is the father of the missing man. His son left his workplace at Kiraoli Tehsil for home on 18 October 2019 at 3.30 pm, travelling on a motorcycle bearing registration number UP 80 DH 7692. The father lodged a missing report. A further report on 19 October 2019 spoke of information that his son had been abducted by unknown persons from the gate of the Tehsil. According to PW1, the second report followed his learning of CCTV footage from cameras installed at the Tehsil. The police obtained the footage and arrested two men seen travelling on the motorcycle: the petitioner and one Lalit Kishore. The charge-sheet was filed and the jurisdictional court took cognizance on 22 January 2020.

PW1’s deposition went further. He said that on 13 November 2019 the two accused came to his house along with Lalit Kishore’s mother, Shalini, demanded a ransom of Rs 50 lakh, and threatened to kill his son, whom they said was in their custody, if it was not paid. The woman, he said, showed him his son’s Aadhaar card and State Bank of India passbook. On his own account he never reported this demand or the threat to the police. By that evening the police had arrested the two accused, and he was called to the Achhnera police station that night, where he saw them in custody.

He then described the recoveries. The police took him and the accused to Radha Rani flats, in front of which there was a drain. His son’s motorcycle was found in the bushes. Near the drain lay a bundle tied in a green and maroon blanket containing a skull, a half-burnt thigh bone, ribs and small bones of the legs. The party then went to Lalit Kishore’s house, where a plastic can, the Aadhaar card and the SBI passbook were recovered along with a black bag belonging to Lalit Kishore. Behind the house were a bag, shoes, a laptop, a charger, registry papers, plain papers and stamp papers belonging to the missing man. None of these recoveries was from the petitioner. All were recorded as made from the co-accused’s house.

PW2, a senior radiologist at the District Women Hospital, Agra, examined the bones. There were eight, some broken, and some ante-mortem injuries were detected on the skull. Neither the time nor the cause of death could be ascertained. The bones were sent to the Forensic Science Laboratory for DNA examination, but nothing was produced at trial to identify them as those of the missing man. PW2 testified that such an examination was necessary to fix the identity of the person, as well as the cause and time of death.

PW3, the head constable, spoke only of registering the missing report and the second report about the CCTV footage. PW4, the sub-inspector, visited the scene of recovery and conducted the inquest with five witnesses, none of whom was examined in court. He obtained the CCTV footage from the Tehsil and made photographs from it, from which the petitioner was said to have been identified. Call detail records of certain mobile numbers were obtained and an inquiry made, but no attempt was made to find out in whose names the SIM cards were subscribed, and the records were not supported by a certificate under Section 65B of the Evidence Act.

PW5, the circle officer and inspector in charge of the police station, narrated how the crime was committed, but without substantiating any of it. On his account, the accused gave the victim sleeping pills and taped his mouth shut, and he suffocated. The Court found no medical evidence for this. PW5 said the accused bought 55 litres of petrol in two cans from a petrol pump on 20 October 2019, burnt the body, wrapped up the remaining bones and dumped them near the drain in front of Radha Rani flats. The place where the body was supposedly burnt was never identified, so no forensic examination of it was possible. No attempt was made to identify the petrol pump or prove the purchase of petrol in two empty cans. The cans were not chemically examined to see whether they had ever held petrol. PW6 knew the deceased, but the Court said it failed to understand why he had been examined at all, since he said nothing about the crime or the people involved.

Four circumstances, none proved

By the time of trial, Lalit Kishore had died and Shalini, the third accused, was absconding. The petitioner alone stood trial. The trial court, in what the Supreme Court called an elaborate judgment, found that none of the four circumstances the prosecution projected was established. Those were: the ransom demand to PW1, which the prosecution characterised as an extra-judicial confession; the confession of the two accused arrested on the basis of the CCTV footage; the last-seen theory, of the two accused being seen with the deceased; and the electronic evidence.

On the ransom demand, the Supreme Court agreed with the trial court that it was never reported to the police and surfaced for the first time in the witness box. In any event it could not be treated as an extra-judicial confession. PW1 had also spoken in court of enmity on Shalini’s part, because he had implicated her son in an earlier criminal case, yet he had said nothing of this in either of his two statements to the police. The accused were not arrested on his pointing out. He identified them only at the police station, after arrest, as the men who had accompanied the woman who made the demand. With the ransom demand unreported and the CCTV footage unproved, the Court said it was kept in the dark as to how the three were ever identified as the accused and arrested.

The confession could not be relied on, having been made to the police. No last-seen theory was effectively proved. The trial court had categorically found the CCTV footage unclear and the persons on the motorbike difficult to identify. The electronic evidence consisted of that footage and the call records, and neither was proved with a certificate under Section 65B.

The bench then listed what else was missing. The motorcycle recovered from the spot where the bones lay was never produced at trial, never put to the witnesses, and its ownership never proved. The FSL result on the bones was not disclosed, and no one tried to take a DNA sample from PW1 to match against them, even though PW2 had said such matching was necessary. PW4 did not testify that PW1 had identified the accused, whether from the footage or as the men who came to his house. The recoveries were not shown to have been concealed by the accused: no statement about concealment was recorded under Section 27 of the Evidence Act before anything was found, and neither the witnesses nor the investigating officer deposed that the accused led them to the places of seizure. PW1’s own evidence was that the police led him and the accused to the spot and to the house of the co-accused.

Reparation for a man the bench called a victim of the system

The Court said it was unfortunate that, with no evidence against him, the petitioner had been imprisoned for six years as an undertrial. A slipshod investigation had led to a haphazard prosecution, which fortunately ended in acquittal. The bench deprecated the way both were conducted. It noted that it had been seized only of a bail application, in which its direction to complete the trial had produced the acquittal of the sole accused who faced trial, and that it had spent its time going through the judgment in order to caution the State about how investigations are carried out. The State police, it said, would do well to educate their officers in the process of investigation.

The judgment then turned to the man himself. Six years had been erased from his life on the strength of a concocted story built on surmises and conjectures. “Not even a rudimentary investigation was carried out.” The investigating agency had also taken no steps to expedite the trial, at least against the petitioner, even after one co-accused had died and the other was absconding. The State, the Court said, cannot shirk its responsibility to protect its citizens, especially when a person charged with a crime is presumed innocent until proved guilty. Investigating and prosecuting agencies do not exist merely to secure a conviction by whatever means. They should see themselves as stakeholders in the justice system, ensuring justice not only to the victim, the complainant and the injured but also to the accused. The bench said it comes across such travesties in many matters, but some are so blatant and shocking that they require reparation to the accused, who is in turn “a victim of the system”.

Order

The State of Uttar Pradesh must pay the petitioner Rs 6,00,000 within one month of 26 October 2026, an amount the Court itself described as paltry against the years spent in custody. If it is not paid within that time, it will carry interest at 18 per cent per annum. A copy of the order is to be sent to the Director General of Police and the Home Secretary of Uttar Pradesh. The special leave petition was disposed of and pending applications rejected.