Kidnapping and Murder Conviction Quashed by Supreme Court Citing Flawed Probe

Case Title: Kondapaka Sridhar @ Shekar @ Madhu @ Gopi @ Chinna v State of Telangana

Case No.: Criminal Appeal No.4512 of 2025

Coram: Justice JB Pardiwala and Justice K Vinod Chandran

Court Observation

“there was nothing to substantiate the above story but for the confessions, which definitely cannot be relied on to inculpate any of the accused.”

“The prosecution case was that, it was on analyzing the call records that PW11, the I.O, was led to A6, resulting in his arrest and confession. The call records having not been properly proved through the Nodal Officer of the service provider and no certificate under Section 65B having been produced and proved, the entire story of careful analysis of the call records, falls flat,”

“That the deceased died of asphyxia due to smothering, associated with strangulation, is established by the post-mortem report and the dead body was detected, tucked away in a refrigerator inside an apartment. But for these, there is no scrap of evidence, worthy of reliance, to connect A1 to A6 to the murder or even the flat. The IO definitely was led by the confessions and failed to collect any substantive evidence connecting the accused to the crime,”

Kidnapping and Murder Conviction Quashed by Supreme Court Citing Flawed Probe