Opinion Surendra Koli’s acquittal and the lessons of Nithari: Haste and public pressure cannot offer justice
The Nithari case will remain a study in the danger of certainty. It reminds us that justice requires patience, doubt, and courage
Nithari killings Koli walks out of jail. (Source: Express Photo) 
There are cases that change the law, and there are cases that reveal it. The Nithari case did both. I still remember the first time I heard the name Surendra Koli. It was everywhere: On television, in newspapers, in hushed conversations. A quiet Noida neighbourhood had turned into the stage of national horror. The police unearthed human remains, cameras broadcast every frame, and the country watched as if justice could be achieved through spectacle. Before the court could even begin its work, the public had already delivered its verdict.
Years later, in 2021, as a student at NALSAR, I opted for a course, “Defending capital punishment cases,” taught by Yug Mohit Chaudhry, who, with Payoshi Roy, was representing Koli and later secured his acquittal. Reading the case through the discipline of process was unsettling. The documents told a story far removed from what the public had been told. They revealed 60 days of continuous police custody, a confession recorded without meaningful access to counsel, an investigating officer’s presence during the recording, and recoveries from places already known to the public. The forensic trail was incomplete. The case showed how public pressure and investigative shortcuts can build a fiction strong enough to pass for truth.
On November 11, the Supreme Court, in Surendra Koli v State of Uttar Pradesh (2025), used its curative powers to set aside its own 2011 ruling that had confirmed a death sentence. The Court called it “a manifest miscarriage of justice”, pointing out that two contradictory outcomes had emerged from identical evidence. The confession and recoveries that formed the basis of a conviction in one case had been rejected in 12 others. “Two sets of outcomes on the same evidentiary foundation cannot lawfully coexist,” the bench observed. It was a quiet but momentous act of correction.
The judgment is precise in tone but devastating in implication. It exposes how the structure of the investigation had collapsed under its own haste. The accused was kept in prolonged police custody, legal aid was perfunctory, and there was no independent verification of the voluntariness of the confession. Recovery records were inconsistent, and forensic teams did not yield traces of blood, tissue, or human remains “consistent with multiple homicides and dismemberment inside the house”. Even the DNA evidence, which established the identity of the victims, could not connect the accused to the act of murder. The case, built on assumption, was sustained by repetition.
This failure is not exceptional; it is systemic. Our criminal justice process still treats confession as the centrepiece of investigation. It values an immediate admission more than the painstaking pursuit of scientific evidence. This culture encourages coercion and distorts truth. When the investigation begins with the presumption of guilt, each step that follows becomes a ritual of confirmation. A fair trial, by then, is already a formality.
The Nithari case is also a study in how media narratives shape justice. From the first report, guilt was treated as fact. Prime-time anchors filled the gaps of investigation with imagination. The public’s appetite for closure was met by the performance of certainty. The accused became a character in a national drama, and due process became the villain. This is not unique to India. The Aarushi Talwar case, Amanda Knox’s prosecution in Italy, and the wrongful conviction of the Central Park Five in the United States all show how media attention can amplify fear and flatten complexity. Criminologist David Garland once noted that modern societies seek reassurance through punishment; the media, eager for stories, becomes the stage where that reassurance is performed.
The damage, however, is profound. When the media becomes a prosecutor, the investigation becomes defensive, and courts become hesitant. The presumption of innocence, the moral core of criminal law, erodes in the glare of public opinion. What emerges is not justice but theatre. In the Nithari case, this theatre drowned out reason.
The cost of this collapse is shared by all. The accused loses years of life; the families of victims lose the truth; the public loses faith in institutions. The Court itself noted that negligence and delay had corroded the investigation and prevented the real perpetrator from being found. It is a grim paradox that in the pursuit of justice, both the innocent and the bereaved were left without answers.
The SC’s judgment is a sober reminder that fairness is not a luxury but the condition of legitimacy. Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution do not merely prohibit arbitrary state action; they define what it means to govern justly. The law’s authority depends on its capacity to act with restraint. When the state abandons that restraint, punishment becomes spectacle and legality becomes pretext.
The case also invites deeper reflection on the philosophy of punishment itself. Legal theorists from H L A Hart to John Rawls have insisted that the justice of punishment lies not in its severity but in its procedure. If the process is unjust, even a lawful sentence becomes immoral. The Nithari case demonstrates that procedural integrity is not a technical formality; it is the moral core of democracy. When procedure collapses, justice becomes indistinguishable from vengeance.
The deeper tragedy of Nithari lies in what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called “the abuse of memory” — the way societies remember what fits their fear and forget what complicates it. The public memory of the case may never be rewritten, even after the Supreme Court’s ruling. The man once branded a monster will always live in the shadow of that label. The true test for a democracy, therefore, is not how it judges guilt, but how it repairs wrong when the truth shifts.
The Nithari case will remain a study in the danger of certainty. It reminds us that justice requires patience, doubt, and courage. It demands investigators who gather rather than guess, media that informs rather than performs, and citizens who wait before they condemn.
When the Court finally spoke, it did not speak of innocence or guilt. It spoke of failure, of the kind that grows quietly within institutions when vigilance is replaced by spectacle. Justice, when it finally arrived, was not dramatic. It arrived like truth often does — late, fragile, and painfully human.
The writer is an academic lawyer and public policy professional specialising in constitutionalism and access to justice
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