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Kondapaka Sridhar @Shekar @Madhu @Gopi @Chinna v. The State of Telangana

Criminal Appeal · 2026 INSC 951Decided 3 Sept 2026
Crl.A. No.-004512-004512 - 2025
Justice J.B. Pardiwala · Justice K. Vinod Chandran

Background

A man went missing after leaving home, and his father later received a ransom call demanding money, which was partly deposited into a third party's bank account. Police investigation, based on call records, led to the arrest of one accused (A6), who allegedly confessed and led police to a flat where the victim's body was found hidden in a refrigerator, implicating five others including the appellant (A1). The trial court convicted A1 along with several co-accused, but the High Court acquitted everyone except A1, upholding his conviction based only on a watchman's testimony (PW3) and his failure to explain the body's presence in a flat he had allegedly leased.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court found the entire prosecution case built on an inherently unreliable foundation: confessions of co-accused, which cannot legally be used to convict another person, and evidence that collapsed on scrutiny. The alleged watchman (PW3) could not prove he actually worked at the building, produced no visitor register or lease deed, and the person claiming to own the flat produced no ownership documents either, undermining the theory that A1 leased the flat and therefore had to explain the body's presence there. Call records and CCTV footage were never properly proved through the required certification under Section 65B of the Evidence Act, and no independent witness corroborated the recovery of the body based on A6's statement, while A6 himself had already been acquitted, meaning his statement could not be used against A1 either. With no reliable evidence linking A1 to the crime beyond confession-based conjecture, the Court set aside his conviction entirely and ordered his release.

Lesson Learnt

A criminal conviction cannot stand on the confession of a co-accused or on witnesses and electronic evidence (like CCTV or phone records) that are never properly authenticated in law: each link in a circumstantial chain must be independently and reliably proved, or the whole chain fails.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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