22 years erased from a person’s life: Supreme Court acquits man convicted of murder on “shaky” testimony

The Supreme Court on Tuesday acquitted a man who spent 22 years in prison for murder.

A Bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran held that the conviction rested on an eyewitness testimony that was “shaky and highly improbable.”

Hence, the Bench set aside the conviction of one Arjun Jani, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment under Section 302 of the IPC for the murder of a woman in Odisha.

“A person taken into custody on mere suspicion from whom a confession; though not admissible was extracted employing third-degree methods, the trial court fails to evaluate the evidence properly and the High Court remains a moot spectator… cumulatively resulting in 22 years being erased out of a person’s life without any reliable evidence,” the Court said in its order.

The case arose from the murder of three women - Kamala, Sonbari and Ratanai - in Koraput, Odisha.

The prosecution’s case rested almost entirely on one eyewitness, who said she saw Jani strike Ratanai’s head through a gap in her door at around 1 am. She did not disclose the other two murders that night, and only spoke of all three deaths the following morning. Based largely on this testimony, the trial court convicted Jani of Ratanai’s murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Aggrieved by the trial court’s verdict, Jani filed an before the High Court, but with a delay of 3,157 days. The High Court declined to condone this delay and dismissed his appeal without examining it on merits, even though Jani had by then already served over 12 years in prison.

He then moved the Supreme Court, again with a substantial delay of 3,703 days.

The Court first took up the question of this delay. It condoned the delay, calling the High Court’s earlier refusal “very disturbing.”

“The High Court, while declining to condone the delay, ought to have considered the fact that the petitioner was already undergoing sentence past 12 years. The High Court ought to have also considered that it was an appeal through jail. This itself was sufficient for the High Court to take a practical view or rather a sympathetic view of the matter,” that Bench had observed, noting that Jani had by then served almost 22 years.

It thus released Jani on bail on a personal bond of ₹10,000, after noting that jail authorities had certified his conduct in custody as satisfactory throughout his incarceration.

It also directed the District Legal Services Authority, Koraput, to prepare a representation seeking remission of his sentence. With the delay condoned and Jani out on bail, his appeal came to be heard on merits.

On merits, the Court first examined Jani’s remission history, and found that his applications for early release had been rejected six times, most recently in September 2025, despite the State’s own record acknowledging that both the remission policy in force at the time of the offence and the current 2022 policy favoured his case.

The Court found that these rejections were, in substance, driven by apprehensions of a “law and order situation” arising from local opposition to his release and indicated that this could not justify withholding the exercise of the remission power.

The Bench then turned to the evidence on which Jani’s conviction rested. It found the eyewitness’s account riddled with inconsistencies. Her path to the neighbour’s house passed directly by the spot where the other two victims’ bodies were later found, yet she claimed not to have noticed them that night.

She gave differing versions of when and to whom she first disclosed what she had seen, and the neighbour she fled to did not ask why she had arrived trembling with fear in the middle of the night. No relatives or co-residents of the three victims were examined as witnesses, and no one in the locality claimed to have been woken despite three people being bludgeoned to death that night.

“The eyewitness testimony alone resulted in the conviction of the accused, which is not impermissible, but only when the testimony is believable, credible, consistent with the other circumstances and inspires the confidence of the Court,” the Court observed.

The Bench also noted that a prosecution witness had admitted Jani was beaten to extract a confession, one that could not, in any event, be relied on as evidence. The investigating officer could not explain how he had zeroed in on Jani in the first place, and the physical evidence proved similarly weak - stones allegedly used as weapons showed no blood stains, either visually or on forensic testing, and several witnesses contradicted the officer’s own account of where these stones were recovered.

Given that three women had been killed in similar fashion, the Court considered whether this could point to a pattern of serial killings, and summoned the local police station’s SHO to check for comparable incidents around that time. However, no such case came to light.

In view of these shortcomings, the Court held that the prosecution had failed to prove Jani’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

It therefore acquitted him and cancelled his bail bond.

It also directed the District Legal Services Authority at Koraput to assist in Jani's rehabilitation and resettlement, with support from the District Collector’s office.

[Read Judgment]