Justice denied, justice delivered: Nithari accused Koli’s long walk to freedom

On November 11, the Supreme Court acquitted Koli in the last of 13 cases against him, calling the investigation “botched” and a “manifest miscarriage of justice”. The verdict was the culmination of a decades-long legal battle that Koli’s defence team fought, against considerable odds.

This is the story of how Koli finally walked free – defying 13 death sentences and a near-certain date at the gallows.

The crime that shook a nation

In December 2006, skeletal remains of children were discovered in a drain behind House D-5 in Noida’s Sector 31 – the residence of businessman Moninder Singh Pandher. As the drain was dug up, more remains tumbled out. A total of 19 bodies, mostly of poor children who had gone missing from the surrounding Nithari village, were eventually recovered. The nation watched as a story of necrophilia and cannibalism was fed to a frenzied public and the media.

On December 29, 2006, Pandher and his domestic help, Koli, were arrested. The case against Koli was built on two main pillars: his detailed confession before a magistrate and the recovery of bodies, allegedly at his disclosure.

In his confession – leaked to the media even before his trial began – Koli provided a chillingly detailed account of a macabre routine. He admitted to luring girls into the bungalow, often with promises of work or chocolates. Once inside, he would strangle them, sometimes with their own scarves, until they were unconscious or dead. He then confessed to dismembering their bodies with a knife or axe, cooking and eating parts of their flesh and disposing of the remains in the gallery behind the house and the drain in front.

The legal battle

Within a few years of his arrest, in 2009, he was sentenced to death in the first of the 13 cases against him – the murder of a 14-year-old girl, referred to as Victim XYZ in court records. The Allahabad High Court upheld his sentence. In 2011, the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal, calling him a “serial killer” and deeming the case one of the “rarest of rare”.

Koli’s mercy petitions were dismissed by the Uttar Pradesh Governor in 2013 and by the President in 2014. His review petition against the Supreme Court’s 2011 decision was dismissed by the Supreme Court in 2014.

With the highest court having sealed his fate, Koli was destined for the gallows.

The team that fought

It was then – in 2014, eight years after his arrest – that Koli’s case found its way to Yug Chaudhry, a Mumbai-based senior advocate who specialises in death penalty litigation. Along with his team of advocates Payoshi Roy, Siddhartha and Allahabad-based nun Sister Sheeba Jose, Chaudhry took on a case that seemed legally hopeless.

A doctorate in English Literature from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor of Law from the University of Cambridge, Chaudhry describes himself as someone who has a “visceral loathing for the death penalty”. But that was not his only motivation for taking up the case.

“I was interested in this case because it was based on utterly flimsy and fabricated evidence… A crime of gigantic proportions was being pinned on a domestic servant only because he would not have been able to defend himself,” says Chaudhry, whose team has been teaching Koli’s case at law schools in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mumbai. “Students are always shocked that the courts could convict him on such flimsy evidence,” he says.

When Chaudhry’s team first met him, Koli was a broken man.

A Dalit from Mangru Khal village in Almora district of Uttarakhand, Koli had been working for Pandher since July 2004, two years before the Nithari cases came to light. Having dropped out of school due to poverty, Koli had come to Delhi as a migrant labourer, leaving behind an ailing mother, a pregnant wife and an infant daughter.

When Chaudhry’s team first met him, Koli was a broken man. He had become deeply distrustful of the legal aid system – the lawyer assigned to him had joined several lawyers in beating him up when he was first presented in court in January 2007.

He had also been kept in solitary confinement since his arrest eight years ago. “This was wholly unconstitutional. Solitary confinement can only be levied through a judicial order or when the execution is absolutely imminent and the convict has no remedies left,” says advocate Roy, who now practices independently in Mumbai.

Isolated and facing certain death, Koli started learning the law inside his cell. “He didn’t have faith in the legal aid lawyers and understandably so,” says Chaudhry. “He started learning how to cross-examine witnesses on his own. He showed exceptional courage.”

The team’s first major challenge came on September 2, 2014, when a Ghaziabad court issued Koli’s execution warrant and he was shifted to Meerut jail. Koli, alerted by the suddenness of the move, managed to contact Chaudhry.

What followed was a dramatic midnight intervention that saved Koli’s life with hours to spare. Senior advocate Indira Jaising, who had been roped in by Chaudhry, received calls on September 7 about Koli’s impending execution, scheduled for 5.30 am the following morning.

The legal ground for Jaising’s intervention was a Supreme Court judgment of September 2, 2014, which held that all review petitions in death penalty cases must be heard in open court by a three-judge bench. Koli had not been given this opportunity, Jaising argued – his review petition had been heard earlier that year by the judges in their chambers.

“The DG (Prisons) confirmed that the execution had been planned for 5-5:30 am the following morning, the hangman had been called and preparations were underway,” she recalls.

Jaising, who got to know that her urgent application for stay on the death warrant was assigned to Justice H L Dattu’s bench, immediately rushed to the judge’s residence. Waiting on the pavement outside, she coordinated with the court registry. Soon, Justice Dattu sent for Justice Anil R Dave and a two-judge bench was constituted at the judge’s residence. At 1 am on September 8, just four hours before the scheduled hanging, the execution was temporarily stayed.

The court subsequently re-heard the review petition in open court, till which time the death warrant remained suspended.

Long road to freedom

While the Supreme Court later dismissed his review petition in an open hearing in October 2014, the first real ray of hope came in January 2015.

A bench of the High Court, headed by then Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud, commuted Koli’s death sentence in the case of Victim XYZ to life imprisonment. The court did not acquit him but found that an “inordinate and unexplained delay” of 2.6 years in the disposal of his mercy petitions by the state and central governments infringed upon his right to life under Article 21.

Between 2010 and 2021, Koli went on to be sentenced to death in 12 other Nithari cases.

The High Court also held that Koli had been kept in unconstitutional solitary confinement since his trial court conviction in 2009. The judgment also highlighted serious procedural lapses, including that the Governor’s office acted on the “manifestly erroneous” belief that it was bound by judicial findings.

“The 2015 judgment was very vital for our case,” says Chaudhry. “Had the death sentence not been commuted, Koli would have been executed and the truth would have remained buried forever.”

This victory, however, only applied to one case. Between 2010 and 2021, Koli went on to be sentenced to death in 12 other Nithari cases.

The 2011 Supreme Court judgment had a devastating impact on these subsequent trials. By branding him a “serial killer” and describing House D-5 as a “virtual slaughter house”, the apex court’s verdict cast a long shadow over the lower courts, effectively prejudicing his right to a fair trial in the remaining cases.

Advocate Siddhartha of Koli’s legal team explains the predicament: “When the Supreme Court described Koli as a ‘serial killer’ even when trials in other cases were going on, how could one expect a fair trial in the other cases?”

Trial court records from the subsequent convictions show a clear pattern. In at least six of the 12 conviction orders reviewed by The Indian Express, the Ghaziabad trial courts cited the 2011 Supreme Court judgment as binding precedent. They noted that since the apex court had already upheld the legality and voluntariness of Koli’s confession, there was “no question of this court reaching a different finding”.

The ‘cannibal’ narrative

In 2017, Chaudhry’s team filed appeals against the conviction orders in the Allahabad High Court. This was the start of a gruelling battle. Says Roy, “I must have easily spent three or four months at a stretch every year in Allahabad.”

The breakthrough came on October 16, 2023. A High Court bench of Justices Ashwani Kumar Mishra and SAH Rizvi, which was hearing all the appeals against the previous conviction orders, acquitted Koli in the 12 cases, systematically dismantling the prosecution’s entire case. The CBI’s appeals against these acquittals were dismissed by the Supreme Court in July this year. The Supreme Court commended the High Court for “withstanding” media pressure to deliver the judgement and called the trial court orders as being “on the basis of media trial”.

This created a legal paradox: Koli stood acquitted in 12 cases based on a complete discrediting of the evidence, yet remained convicted in the first case based on the very same material. To correct this “manifest injustice”, the Supreme Court took up Koli’s curative petition in the original case – that of Victim XYZ. On November 11, a bench of Chief Justice of India B R Gavai and Justices Surya Kant and Vikram Nath applied the same reasoning from the 12 acquittals, overturned the court’s own 2011 judgment and ordered his immediate release. His co-accused, Moninder Singh Pandher, had already been acquitted in all cases against him by the Allahabad High Court in 2023.

The case against Koli, once seemingly iron-clad, crumbled under scrutiny because its two foundational pillars were found to be vitiated.

The first pillar was the confession, which the High Court found was recorded after Koli had been in uninterrupted police custody for about 60 days, without meaningful legal aid. Under the Criminal Procedure Code, the maximum period of permissible police custody is 15 days. Through these 60 days, he was not allowed to meet his family or any lawyers.

In subsequent letters to the court and in his statements to court during trial, Koli had alleged systematic torture: he claimed he was subjected to electric shocks and had water poured into his mouth, had his nails pulled out with pliers, petrol injected into his anus, his genitals were burnt and that was hung upside down. He also alleged psychological torture, stating that the police forced him to memorise names and facts and threatened to “leave (his) family to the mercy of the frenzied mob who were baying for his blood”.

The High Court, in its 2023 judgment, accepted these allegations, noting that the confession itself contained references to tutoring and torture, rendering it involuntary and inadmissible. The failure to conduct proper medical examinations, despite Koli’s offers to show his scars, further weakened the prosecution’s case.

A botched investigation

The second pillar – the recovery of the bodies – was equally flawed. The defence argued that the police and public already knew about the remains. “Even before Koli pointed out the location, digging had started in the area,” Chaudhry says. “In fact, body parts were being found in that area months before Koli’s arrest.” The recovery site – an open strip of land – was not under Koli’s exclusive control, a key requirement for evidence to be admissible under the Indian Evidence Act.

Even the forensic evidence presented at the initial trial was problematic. Dr T D Dogra, then head of Forensic Medicine at AIIMS, recalled a “chalk-marking exercise” in which Koli, in police custody, was asked to demonstrate on a cadaver how he cut the bodies. The Allahabad High Court later ruled this demonstration inadmissible, deeming it an extra-judicial confession made while in police custody.

The court also slammed the investigation for its glaring omissions. The theory of cannibalism was never substantiated with forensic evidence. No bloodstains or human remains were found inside Pandher’s house. The police’s claim that Koli hacked the bodies with a crude axe was contradicted by forensic opinion that suggested the bodies were severed with “surgical precision”.

Most damningly, the investigation never pursued the organ trade angle, which had been flagged by a committee of the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development in a 2007 report. The Chief Medical Superintendent of Noida had deposed to the committee that the torsos of all the bodies were missing and the remains were dismembered with “surgical precision”, leading him to suggest that the cannibalism narrative could have been a “ruse to divert attention”. The report also flagged that the resident of the adjoining house, D-6, near which many of the skeletal remains were found, was a doctor previously arrested in a kidney scam.

Despite the committee recommending an investigation, the CBI and police failed to probe this lead or even interrogate the doctor.

“There is not a single organ that has been found; only heads and legs,” Chaudhry points out. “The bones have been acid-washed. This was a very organised crime of organ trade.”

The human cost

For Koli, the acquittal comes after 19 lost years. He is, in Chaudhry’s words, a “totally broken person who had been psychologically deeply scarred”.

His family was destroyed. “His brothers were called siblings of the cannibal,” says Roy. “They lost their jobs. They were harassed so much by the media and by the CBI that they had to change their names and distance themselves from him just to survive.”

Roy and Siddhartha recall that in 2014, Koli’s mother travelled to jail to see him after she got word that he would be executed. She passed away a few years later. Koli never got furlough or parole through his 19 years in prison.

He is estranged from his wife, who went on to remarry, and his two children, a daughter now in her early 20s and a 19-year old son. Since he was arrested when his wife was pregnant with his son, he has never met him.

Throughout the ordeal, Koli’s resilience kept his legal team going. Chaudhry recalls him saying, “Do whatever you have to do… I’ll manage in jail from my side. Don’t worry.”

His lawyers say that while Koli is happy to be free, he is also afraid of being hounded by the media or people who still believe he is guilty.

Chaudhry says Koli’s case will serve as a cautionary tale on the dangers of a justice system susceptible to media trials and investigative lapses. “Whenever there is a media trial, justice is the biggest casualty. Evidence which would have been rejected by a law student was accepted by judge after judge, including by judges of the Supreme Court.”