The Supreme Court has acquitted a man convicted of murder, holding that WhatsApp messages allegedly linking him to the crime could not sustain his conviction when the purported sender denied sending them and the prosecution witnesses did not support the prosecution's account of the incident, LiveLaw reported on Friday, October 23. The case is Kusumlal Sao v. State of Chhattisgarh.

Source: LiveLaw — Disputed WhatsApp Message Cannot Sustain Conviction: Supreme Court Acquits Man In Murder Case (Oct 23, 2026)

A bench of Justice Manoj Misra and Justice Vijay Bishnoi heard the case, in which the accused had been convicted, among other things, on the basis of a WhatsApp chat between two prosecution witnesses in which the accused was said to be responsible for the murder of his deceased friend. The chat referred to a fight between the accused and the deceased before his death. However, neither the sender nor the receiver had witnessed the alleged incriminating role of the accused, LiveLaw reported.

'The exchange of message between PW-5 and PW-6 does not prove that on the fateful night the deceased was present in the house of the accused and that the accused had assaulted the deceased; it, at best, creates a suspicion against the accused-appellant which by itself is not sufficient to sustain conviction,' the Court said.

The Court declined to treat the texting as an exception to hearsay evidence under Section 6 of the Evidence Act. For Section 6 to apply, the fact of texting would have to be so connected with the crime as to form part of the same transaction, and the Court noted that the time of death had not been fixed by any substantive evidence, making it difficult to ascertain whether the message was sent at or about the time of the occurrence.

A 2019 death, a phone chat and disputed recoveries

According to the prosecution, the deceased was found dead in an open field on February 9, 2019, with a motorcycle around him tied with a rope, and the autopsy suggested a homicidal death, after which an FIR was lodged against unknown persons, LiveLaw reported. During the investigation, police seized the phones of prosecution witnesses PW-5 and PW-6, and forensic analysis showed a WhatsApp message sent from PW-5's phone to PW-6's phone on the night of February 7–8, 2019, referring to a fight between the appellant and the deceased. On the accused's disclosure statement, police also recovered an iron rod and a screwdriver from his house, along with a blood-stained shirt and blood-stained soil. He was charged under Sections 302 and 201 of the IPC and convicted by the Sessions Court, and the High Court sustained the conviction.

Source: LawFinder News — Supreme Court acquits Chhattisgarh man in murder case, says suspicion cannot replace proof (Oct 19, 2026)

Before the Supreme Court, the accused argued that the conviction could not rest on the texting when both prosecution witnesses had turned hostile and denied texting each other about his alleged involvement. The judgment, authored by Justice Misra, observed that the prosecution had tried to place the entire weight on the texting in a case that rested on circumstantial evidence, and that both witnesses had denied seeing the accused with the deceased in a fight or quarrel.

Apart from the unreliability of the messages, the Court found the chain of circumstantial evidence incomplete, DNA evidence missing, and the possibility of an accident not ruled out. On the recoveries, it noted that the blood stains could not be connected to the deceased and that there was no DNA profile of the recovered blood to match with the deceased — the same position, it said, applied to the iron rod and the screwdriver. The appeal was allowed and the conviction set aside.