Between 14 years and the gallows: the Sriharan vacuum

On April 6, the Madurai trial court in Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) v Sridhar sentenced nine suspended policemen to death. They had killed P. Jayaraj and his son J. Bennix in police custody in June 2020. Judge G. Muthukumaran’s reasoning is being celebrated as judicial intolerance of uniformed brutality. It is also worth reading as a confession. The case fell within the rarest of rare, he wrote, in terms that left no room for life imprisonment

The doctrine he was applying comes from Bachan Singh v State of Punjab (1980). There a Constitution Bench held that the death sentence may be imposed only in the rarest of rare cases when the “alternative option of life imprisonment is unquestionably foreclosed”. The Sattankulam judge believed it was foreclosed. The trial court had only two options. It could send the convicts away for life. Or it could send them to the gallows. What it could not do was occupy the middle ground constitutional courts have fashioned since 2008. That ground is a life sentence quantified in years, twenty or thirty or forty, served without remission. The intermediate sentence has become a fixture of Indian capital jurisprudence. It remains off-limits to the trial courts themselves.