On April 6, a Madurai court in Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Vs. Sridhar to the death of nine suspended police officers. They killed P. Jayaraj and his son J. Bennix in police custody in June 2020. Justice G. Muthukumaran’s reasoning is hailed as judicial intolerance of uniformed brutality. It is also worth reading as a confession. The case was among the rarest of rare, he wrote, in terms that did not allow for a life sentence
The doctrine which he applied came from Bachan Singh Vs. State of Punjab (1980). The Constitutional Court ruled that the death sentence can only be imposed in rare cases where “the alternative option of life imprisonment is undoubtedly excluded”. The Sattankulam Magistrate held that it was seized. The trial court had only two options. It could send a convict away for life. Or it could send them to the gallows. What he could not do was occupy the middle ground that the constitutional courts have been shaping since 2008. That reason is a life sentence calculated in years, twenty, thirty or forty, served without parole. The interlocutory sentence has become part of India’s capital city jurisprudence. It remains barred to the trial courts themselves.
Published – 13 Apr 2026 06:00 IST
