An Indian court has handed down the death penalty to nine police officers for the custodial deaths of a father and son during the pandemic, bringing to a close a case that had caused national outrage and renewed scrutiny of police brutality.
P Jayaraj, a 58-year-old trader, and his son J Benicks, 31, died within days of being detained during the Covid lockdown. They were accused by police in the southern state of Tamil Nadu of keeping their mobile phone shop open beyond permitted hours, an allegation investigators later said was unfounded.
Delivering the ruling on Monday, the trial judge described the deaths as a grave abuse of power and placed the case in the “rarest of the rare” category, a legal threshold reserved for the most extreme crimes in India.
“They did this with the intention of killing,” the judge said.
According to the prosecution, the two men were stripped and tortured through the night at the Sathankulam police station, often in front of each other.
“Where there was power, there should be responsibility. Jayaraj and Benicks were unarmed and were tortured at regular intervals all through the night at the police station,” the judge said.
The court found the violence wasn’t incidental but deliberate, carried out as retribution after a confrontation with officers. “They attacked unarmed people. They should not be forgiven. They should not be given lesser sentences based on their age or family background,” the judge said. “They are all educated,” the judge said.
Investigators from the Central Bureau of Investigation, the federal agency which took over the case amid public pressure, said the officers tortured the father and son to “teach them a lesson on how to behave with the police”.
The agency concluded that the officers knowingly inflicted injuries severe enough to cause death. Evidence presented in court also pointed to attempts to cover up the crime, including forcing the victims to clean their own blood and destroying material evidence.
Ten officers were originally charged, but one died during the trial after contracting Covid. The remaining nine were convicted last month of murder, criminal conspiracy, and destruction of evidence.
The case had sparked widespread protests across Tamil Nadu in 2020, with politicians, activists and public figures demanding accountability. The deaths became a flashpoint in a broader debate about custodial violence in India, where rights groups say hundreds of people die in custody each year and allegations of torture remain persistent.
In his ruling, the trial judge said: “The police personnel were mentally sound and well-educated. They were drawing government salaries. Those who should protect and safeguard the public acted in such a manner. It was a case of the fence eating the crop.”
The court also imposed fines totalling more than Rs10m (£81,000) on the convicted officers.
While India retains the death penalty, executions are rare, with the last carried out in 2020. Four men convicted in 2013 for the 2012 gang rape and murder of a young woman in the capital Delhi were executed in March 2020 after years of legal appeals, in a case that drew global attention to sexual violence in India.
“The court verdict marks a rare moment of accountability in India’s long struggle against police torture,” Aakar Patel, Amnesty International India’s chair of board, said in a statement. “The verdict acknowledges the brutality of a crime that shocked the nation. But this death penalty sentence is not justice – it is a deflection from the deeper reforms urgently required to ensure police oversight and accountability,” he said.
“What is needed is structural reform. India must ratify the UN Convention against Torture, a long-pending step that would legally bind the country to international law and strengthen domestic accountability mechanisms. India must also facilitate the visit of UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, whose requests have gone unanswered since 1999.”
“Justice for Jayaraj, Bennix and thousands of others lies in transforming the institutions that enabled their deaths and ensuring it will never happen again,” Mr Patel said.
