In Brief
The Supreme Court dismissed a CBI appeal challenging the acquittal of accused in two TADA cases involving the kidnapping and murder of Kashmir University's Vice-Chancellor and an HMT official. The Court held that confessional statements recorded under Section 15 of the TADA Act must strictly comply with procedural safeguards: they require adequate time for reflection, contemporaneous question-and-answer records, precise documentation of time and location, and submission to the Chief Judicial Magistrate. The confessions were recorded on the same day as arrest in guarded camps without proper procedural compliance. Additionally, one accused's confession was previously rejected in a separate case, invoking issue estoppel. With weak eyewitness evidence and the weapon unrecovered, conviction could not stand on defective confessions alone.
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