The High Court Said the Eyewitnesses Couldn’t Have Seen the Murder, Yet Upheld Life Terms for Six Men: Why the Supreme Court Reversed It (Kartika @ Kirtan v. State of Odisha, 2026 INSC 1015)

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Here is a puzzle worth carrying into your next criminal law class. A trial court convicts six men of murder on the strength of six eyewitnesses. On appeal, the High Court decides that none of those eyewitnesses could have seen the assault, because it took place on a pitch-dark night. The convictions stay anyway. How is that possible, and should it have been?

On 18 September 2026, the Supreme Court answered the second half of that question. In Kartika @ Kirtan @ Kirtan Charan Jena & Anr. Etc. vs The State of Odisha (Criminal Appeal Nos. 1047-1048 of 2010, with Criminal Appeal No. 2223 of 2010), reported as 2026 INSC 1015, a Bench of Justices M.M. Sundresh and Prasanna B. Varale set aside the life sentences of the four remaining appellants. The judgment, authored by Justice Varale, is a compact lesson in what happens when a prosecution loses its eyewitnesses and tries to survive on circumstances alone.

The Story the Prosecution Told

It begins on 14 May 2001. According to the prosecution, at about 4:00 PM an accused named Narendra @ Narahari Behera walked into the informant’s house, abused the family in obscene language and threatened to kill Dhruba Pradhan. By about 7:00 PM, a group carrying a kata, a tenta, stones and a saw was back at the same house, searching for Dhruba and repeating the threat before leaving towards Abhayapur.

Around the same time, the prosecution said, Dhruba was riding a motorcycle when he was stopped at Agi Chhak. He tried to escape, but he was caught, lifted into a nearby paddy field and beaten to death with a laterite stone thrown on his head, along with a thenga, an iron rod and a bhujali. His motorcycle was thrown into a pond. His brother, PW-3 Siba Prasad Pradhan, lodged the FIR (No. 128 of 2001) at 2:00 AM on 15 May 2001, and the police seized articles from the spot, including the deceased’s chopped-up right wrist, a laterite stone and a lathi.

Eighteen Accused, Six Convictions, Four Appellants

The chargesheet named eighteen accused. One died and his case abated, three were declared absconders and had their cases split up, and fourteen were sent for trial on charges under Sections 148 (rioting armed with a deadly weapon), 506/149 (criminal intimidation by a member of an unlawful assembly) and 302/149 (murder by a member of an unlawful assembly) of the Indian Penal Code, 1860. The prosecution examined 26 witnesses. The defence examined one.

28 January 2004: The Ad hoc Additional District and Sessions Judge, Jajpur convicted six accused and acquitted eight by giving them the benefit of doubt. The six received life imprisonment and a fine of Rs. 3,000 each for the offence under Section 302, with six months’ rigorous imprisonment in default of payment.
6 May 2009: The High Court of Orissa at Cuttack dismissed the appeals (Criminal Appeal Nos. 78 and 84 of 2004) and upheld all six convictions.
The Supreme Court appeals: Two of the six, Upendra Sethi and Madhu Pradhan, died while the appeals were pending, so the appeals abated as to them. Four appellants remained.
18 September 2026: The Supreme Court allowed the appeals and set the convictions aside.

That is 25 years and four months between the night of the killing and the day the country’s top court gave its verdict.

The High Court’s Unusual Middle Path

On re-appreciating the evidence, the High Court discarded the eyewitness testimony. Its reasoning was that the persons who assaulted the deceased could not have been identified on a pitch-dark night merely by the sound of the assault. Yet it did not acquit anyone. It held that although the prosecution had failed to prove its case by direct evidence, the case was proved by circumstantial evidence, and it upheld the conviction of all six accused.

The Supreme Court began exactly there. If the direct evidence is gone, what is the circumstantial case actually made of?

What Each Side Argued

The appellants, represented by Mrs. Rajdipa Behura and Mr. J.K. Das, Senior Advocates, built their challenge on the record itself:

Once the High Court rejected the testimony of PWs 3, 4, 10, 11, 17 and 26, a conviction resting on that same weak evidence could not survive.
The six eyewitnesses were interested witnesses, being brothers and sisters-in-law of the deceased, and PW-17 contradicted the others.
Testimony of PW-3 and PW-24 (the Investigating Officer) showed that the deceased faced 13 criminal cases, including rape and murder, and that roughly 200 to 250 people were searching for him that night. False implication, the appellants said, could not be ruled out.
No motive was proved against Haladhar Rout, who was described as being on cordial and visiting terms with the deceased’s family.
Every recovery, including the chopped wrist, the laterite stones and the lathi, was made from the spot. Nothing was recovered at the instance of any appellant.
Although hundreds of villagers were allegedly searching for the deceased, no independent witness was examined.

Mr. Vishnu Kant, for the State of Odisha, defended the concurrent findings of the courts below. He argued that an unbroken chain of circumstances proved the murder, that once a common object under Section 149 IPC is established the overt act of each accused need not be proved, that the accused offered no explanation for facts especially within their knowledge, that the hostile witnesses PW-14 and PW-15 could be relied upon for the trustworthy portions of their evidence, and that related witnesses should not be discarded merely because of the relationship.

The Supreme Court found considerable merit in the appellants’ submissions and declined to agree with the High Court.

Question One: Who Was Really There?

The prosecution’s case rested primarily on six alleged eyewitnesses: PWs 3, 4, 10, 11, 17 and 26. The Court first noted a fact that colours everything else. Every one of them was related to the deceased. PW-3 and PW-4 were his brothers, and PW-10, PW-11, PW-17 and PW-26 were his sisters-in-law.

Relationship alone does not make a witness unreliable, and the Court did not say it did. What troubled the Bench was that the witnesses could not even agree on who was present.

PW-3’s own testimony showed that he was not at the spot when the incident occurred.
In the FIR that PW-3 himself lodged, he had said that only PW-17 and PW-26 witnessed the occurrence.
PW-4 then told the court that he, PW-3, PW-10, PW-11, PW-17 and PW-26 were all watching the accused at the time of the incident.

The Court treated this as a significant inconsistency in the prosecution case. It also found the witnesses’ conduct unnatural. PW-3, who elsewhere claimed to be an eyewitness, could not say which accused carried which weapon. By his own account, he went home after the assault, came back to the spot two hours later, and made no attempt to tell other family members or anyone else in the village about so serious an incident.

Question Two: Could Anyone Have Seen Anything?

The incident happened on a pitch-dark night. The Court asked whether witnesses could have watched it, and recognised the assailants, from a distance of 60 cubits. To answer, it returned to two older decisions.

State of U.P. v. Ashok Kumar ((1979) 3 SCC 1) involved witnesses who claimed to have identified the accused by moonlight from a long distance. Relying on an old criminology text by Dr Hans Gross on how far a person can be recognised in moonlight, the Court there found the identification unreliable. It also doubted that witnesses would have dared to switch on torches in front of armed men, and held that even with torches, identification from such a distance could not be certain.

Tamilselvan v. State ((2008) 7 SCC 755) turned on who held the torch. The accused, not the witnesses, carried the torches. The Court found it hard to believe the witnesses could have identified anyone and observed that the glare of the assailants’ torches could have partly blinded them.

The Bench held that the present case was weaker than both. In Ashok Kumar there was at least moonlight. Here it was a pitch-dark night, and the only light came from the accused themselves, who used a torch to identify the deceased. Combined with the High Court’s own categorical finding that the witnesses could not have watched the incident or identified the assailants by the sound of the assault, the Supreme Court concluded that the eyewitness testimony could not be relied upon.

Question Three: What Was Left of the Prosecution’s Case?

The Court accepted that the medical evidence clearly established a homicidal death. The real issue was authorship: had the prosecution proved that these appellants did it? With the eyewitnesses discarded, the case became one resting solely on circumstantial evidence. The High Court had relied on eight circumstances:

Narendra @ Narahari Behera visited the deceased’s house at 4 PM and threatened to kill him.
The appellants came armed to the deceased’s house at 7 PM.
PW-14 and PW-15 said that 200 to 250 persons were searching for the deceased.
The appellants waited at Agi Chhak, identified the deceased by torchlight and assaulted him.
The appellants were identified through their voices.
Eyewitnesses heard the sound of the assault.
The appellants waited for two hours to assault the deceased’s family members.
A weapon was recovered from the spot, along with the deceased’s motorcycle.

The Supreme Court did not accept that these added up. The first, second and fourth circumstances rested substantially on the same six witnesses, whose accounts were materially inconsistent about who was and who was not present. The identification circumstance was, in the Court’s view, misconceived: having discarded the witnesses on this point, the High Court could not treat identification as proved.

The prosecution’s theory of the fatal weapon fared no better. It said the deceased died from a laterite stone weighing 53 kg. The Court found no material showing how such a heavy stone was brought or who brought it, and the police never recovered it. The medical officer, PW-18, deposed that a laterite stone like the exhibited MO3 could cause a fracture and brain haemorrhage if thrown from a height of two feet on the head of a person lying on the ground. He also stated that the Investigating Officer never sent him any weapon of offence, including a laterite stone like MO3, for his opinion.

Question Four: What Does the Law Demand From a Chain of Circumstances?

The Bench turned to the five principles from Sharad Birdhichand Sarda v. State of Maharashtra, (1984) 4 SCC 116, often called the panchsutra of circumstantial evidence:

The circumstances from which guilt is to be inferred must first be fully established.
The facts so established must be consistent only with the hypothesis that the accused is guilty.
The circumstances must be of a conclusive nature and tendency.
They must exclude every hypothesis except the one proposed to be proved.
The chain of evidence must be so complete that no reasonable ground remains for a conclusion consistent with innocence, and it must show that within all human probability the accused committed the act.

Two more decisions sharpened the point. Kamal v. State (NCT of Delhi), 2023 SCC OnLine SC 933, stressed that the circumstances must or should be established, not merely may be established, and that however strong a suspicion may be, it cannot take the place of proof beyond reasonable doubt. Abdul Nassar v. State of Kerala, 2025 SCC OnLine SC 111, added that each link must be meticulously examined and proved individually before a court asks whether the links together form an unbroken chain.

Question Five: So Why Did the Chain Break?

Viewed cumulatively, the Court held, the prosecution failed to establish a complete and consistent chain of circumstances that excluded every hypothesis other than the guilt of the appellants. The evidence left substantial gaps that created a reasonable doubt about their involvement. And where two views are reasonably possible, the Court reminded, the one favourable to the accused must prevail.

The Court concluded that the High Court was not justified in affirming the convictions and that the appellants were entitled to the benefit of doubt. It allowed the appeals and set aside both the High Court’s judgment of 6 May 2009 and the trial court’s conviction and sentence of 28 January 2004.

In one line: a court may convict without eyewitnesses, but only if the remaining circumstances can stand without leaning on the witnesses it has just rejected.

What Lawyers and Law Students Should Take From This Judgment

Attack visibility, not just credibility. Pin down the light source, the distance and who held the torch. In this case those facts decided the fate of a life sentence.
Compare the FIR with the deposition. PW-3’s FIR and his testimony differed on who witnessed the incident, and PW-4 contradicted him again.
Ask what survives without the discarded evidence. If an appellate court rejects the eyewitnesses, test which circumstances still stand independently of them.
Test each circumstance alone before testing the chain. A chain built from unproved links proves nothing, however many links there are.
Map the missing links. An unrecovered weapon, no medical opinion on the alleged weapon and no independent witness among hundreds of searchers were all gaps the defence turned into doubt.

From Reading Judgments to Winning Them: Build Your Criminal Litigation Career

Cases like this are won long before judgment day. They are won in the grounds of appeal, the written submissions and the questions put to witnesses in cross-examination. The appellants’ winning arguments here came straight from a careful reading of the record: the FIR that contradicted the deposition, the recoveries never linked to any accused, the independent witnesses who were never examined. That is a drafting skill, and it can be learned.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What did the Supreme Court decide in Kartika @ Kirtan v. State of Odisha (2026 INSC 1015)?

On 18 September 2026, a Bench of Justices M.M. Sundresh and Prasanna B. Varale allowed the appeals, set aside the High Court of Orissa’s judgment of 6 May 2009 and the trial court’s conviction and sentence of 28 January 2004, and held that the appellants were entitled to the benefit of doubt. The prosecution had failed to establish a complete chain of circumstances excluding every hypothesis other than guilt.

Can a court convict a person of murder after rejecting all the eyewitness testimony?

A court can convict on circumstantial evidence, but only if that evidence independently proves guilt. The Supreme Court restated that every circumstance must be established individually, must point only to the guilt of the accused, and must form a chain so complete that no reasonable ground remains for a conclusion consistent with innocence. Here, key circumstances rested on the same witnesses the High Court had already discarded, so the conviction could not stand.

Why did the Supreme Court say the eyewitnesses could not identify the accused?

The incident took place on a pitch-dark night, and the only light came from a torch used by the accused themselves. Relying on State of U.P. v. Ashok Kumar and Tamilselvan v. State, the Court held that identification from a distance in such conditions is unreliable, since even moonlight would not have allowed safe recognition and the assailants’ own torchlight could have partly blinded the witnesses. The High Court had itself found that the witnesses could not have seen the incident or identified the assailants merely by the sound of the assault.

What is the panchsutra of circumstantial evidence?

It is the set of five principles from Sharad Birdhichand Sarda v. State of Maharashtra, (1984) 4 SCC 116. The circumstances must be fully established, consistent only with the guilt of the accused, conclusive in nature, exclusive of every other hypothesis, and part of a chain so complete that within all human probability the act must have been done by the accused.

What are the citation, Bench and case numbers for this judgment?

The case is reported as 2026 INSC 1015 and was decided on 18 September 2026 by a Bench of Justices M.M. Sundresh and Prasanna B. Varale. It decided Criminal Appeal Nos. 1047-1048 of 2010 with Criminal Appeal No. 2223 of 2010, arising from the judgment of the High Court of Orissa at Cuttack dated 6 May 2009 in Criminal Appeal Nos. 78 and 84 of 2004.

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