Six years inside on a story nobody proved: the Supreme Court makes UP pay an acquitted undertrial

Arun alias Deepak came to the Supreme Court asking for bail. He had been an undertrial since 14 November 2019 in an Agra kidnapping-and-murder case. By the time the Court finished with his petition on 26 October 2026, he had been acquitted. The Court went further and ordered Uttar Pradesh to pay him ₹6 lakh within a month, with 18% interest if it paid late. It called the sum "paltry" against the years lost, and called him "a victim of the system".

The order is eleven pages long and cites no precedent. The law it rests on is well settled, though, and every step of the investigation it criticises corresponds to an Evidence Act rule that judiciary exams test regularly. This explainer works through both.

How a bail plea became a review of the whole case

The FIR (No. 367 of 2019, P.S. Achhnera) was registered under Sections 364, 302 and 201 IPC. The BNS equivalents are Sections 140(1), 103 and 238. On 23 March 2026 the Court looked at the record and noticed several things. Arun was not named in the FIR or in any Section 161 statement. He had been added as an accused because of CCTV footage and a co-accused's confession. The "recovery" was of charred bones that nobody had identified. The Court did not decide bail on those doubts. It directed the trial court to finish the trial within three months.

The trial ended in acquittal. The Court then sent for the trial judgment, which ran to more than 100 pages in Hindi, and had it translated. Having read it, the bench said it was "appalled" by the investigation.

By the time of trial, Lalit Kishore had died and his mother Shalini, the third accused, had absconded. Arun stood trial alone. The prosecution examined six witnesses: the father, a radiologist, a head constable, a sub-inspector, the circle officer who investigated, and one independent witness who, the Court noted, did not say anything about the crime.

Four circumstances, and the rule each one ran into

With no eyewitness, the case was purely circumstantial. The standard test is the five-fold one in Sharad Birdhichand Sarda v. State of Maharashtra, (1984) 4 SCC 116. The circumstances must be fully established. They must be consistent only with guilt. They must be conclusive. They must exclude every other hypothesis. And together they must form a chain that leaves no reasonable ground for a conclusion of innocence. Here the chain never formed, because none of its links was proved.

The electronic-evidence failure is the one most worth knowing for an exam. A three-judge bench in Arjun Panditrao Khotkar v. Kailash Kushanrao Gorantyal (2020) held that the Section 65B(4) certificate is a precondition for admitting secondary electronic evidence, following Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer. Section 63 of the BSA keeps the requirement and tightens it. The certificate must be in the form given in the BSA's Schedule, and it must go with the record each time the record is produced. CCTV footage copied by an investigator, with no certificate, would fail under either statute.

Recoveries the police made, not discoveries the accused led them to

The prosecution's real case was the recoveries. These were the bones in a blanket near a drain outside Radha Rani flats, the victim's motorcycle in the bushes, and his Aadhaar card, passbook, laptop and papers from the co-accused's house and the area behind it. Under Section 27 IEA (the proviso to Section 23(2) BSA), information from an accused in custody is admissible only to the extent it "distinctly" relates to a fact discovered as a result of it. Pulukuri Kottaya v. Emperor, AIR 1947 PC 67, settled that the "fact discovered" includes the accused's knowledge of where the object was. That is why the statement has to come before the recovery and has to be proved.

Both of those were missing. No disclosure statement was recorded from either accused before the seizures. The father's own account was that the police took him and the accused to the spots. Nothing was recovered from Arun. The joint "recovery" was recorded as made from the co-accused's house. Without a Section 27 statement, a recovery shows only that an object was found somewhere. It does not show who knew it was there.

Bones nobody linked to the missing man

This part of the order is the clearest guide to how not to investigate a murder:

• The radiologist examined eight bones and found ante-mortem injuries to the skull. He could fix neither the time nor the cause of death, and said DNA testing was needed to identify the person.
• The bones were sent to the FSL, but no result was ever produced. Nobody took the father's DNA for comparison.
• The police said the body was burnt with 55 litres of petrol bought in two cans. The petrol pump was never identified, the cans were never chemically tested, and the place of burning was never found.
• The motorcycle recovered with the bones was never produced at trial, shown to a witness, or proved to belong to the victim.
• None of the five inquest witnesses was examined.
• The investigating officer's account of sleeping pills and a taped mouth had no medical support.

The BNSS now addresses part of this. Section 176(3) makes it mandatory for forensic experts to visit the crime scene in offences punishable with seven years or more. That does not guarantee a competent investigation, but it creates a record a court can check.

"Six years have been erased from the life of a man on the strength of a concocted story built on mere surmises and conjectures."

Where the power to award ₹6 lakh comes from

The order does not say. It calls the payment "reparation" and grounds it in the State's duty to protect a person who is presumed innocent. The doctrine behind it is public-law compensation for violation of Article 21, which the Supreme Court has built up over four decades:

• Rudul Sah v. State of Bihar, (1983) 4 SCC 141. A man acquitted in 1968 was kept in jail until 1982. The Court ordered compensation in a writ petition, so the remedy for a fundamental-rights violation was not only release.
• Nilabati Behera v. State of Orissa, (1993) 2 SCC 746. A custodial death. The Court held that compensation under Articles 32 and 226 is a public-law remedy based on strict liability, and that sovereign immunity does not apply to it. It is separate from, and in addition to, a civil claim in tort.

Arun's case adds a procedural point. The award was made in an SLP filed for bail, after the trial had ended, with no separate writ petition. The order does not name the provision it relies on; the natural sources are Articles 136 and 142. The 18% default interest is the Court making sure the order is actually obeyed.

The gap the BNSS did not fill

India still has no statute that compensates a person who is wrongfully prosecuted. In its 277th Report (30 August 2018), Wrongful Prosecution (Miscarriage of Justice): Legal Remedies, the Law Commission recommended amending the CrPC. It proposed special courts in each district to decide compensation claims, and drafted a bill. The reference came from the Delhi High Court's ruling in Babloo Chauhan v. State (NCT of Delhi). The BNSS, enacted five years later, did not adopt it.

What the BNSS has is narrower:

• Section 273 BNSS (old Section 250 CrPC) lets a Magistrate order the complainant or informant to pay compensation for an accusation without reasonable cause. It does not reach the State, and it does not reach Sessions cases like this one.
• Section 479 BNSS (old Section 436A) caps undertrial detention at half the maximum sentence, or one-third for a first-time offender. It expressly excludes offences punishable with death or life imprisonment, and the BNSS added life imprisonment to that exclusion. A murder accused like Arun gets no statutory ceiling at all. His only protection is the Article 21 right to a speedy trial, which is what the Court's three-month direction enforced.

A 15-mark answer, built from this case

"Discuss the remedies available to a person who is acquitted after prolonged pre-trial detention." One way to structure it:

1. Article 21 framing: speedy trial and liberty as fundamental rights. Detention without proof is a continuing violation.
2. Public-law compensation: Rudul Sah and Nilabati Behera; strict liability, no sovereign immunity. Arun @ Deepak (2026) as a recent application in an SLP, with default interest.
3. Private-law routes: malicious prosecution in tort, and Section 273 BNSS against a false informant. Point out the limits of each.
4. Statutory gap: Section 479 BNSS excludes death and life offences. The Law Commission's 277th Report was never enacted.
5. Prevention: Section 63 BSA certificates, the Section 27 discipline on disclosure statements, and forensic visits under Section 176(3) BNSS.

Three questions from this record