A new lease of life under the sun for death row prisoners
For over a decade, Kailash, 70, lived with the dread that he would outlive his son, who had been sentenced to death. In his dilapidated two-room house in a north Indian village, the cracked and flaking walls mirror the long vigil in their slow decay.As the seasons passed, Kailash’s body, too, became a battleground. A kidney ailment left him incontinent and in constant pain. But when his son returned home following his acquittal, after more than 11 years in incarceration, Kailash finally underwent the surgery he had long deferred.Kailash’s daughter, Sangeeta, 35, who tended to him through nights of agony, recalls those years with a shudder. “My father would scream until dawn,” she says. “We were helpless. He finally got relief when my brother returned and made sure the surgery happened.”The family’s lives came undone on a cold December morning more than 11 years ago when their sole breadwinner, Rakesh, then in his 20s, was arrested and accused by the police of murdering his wife and two infant sons. “He was not at home when the murder happened,” his sister says. Yet, a trial court sentenced him to death, and the High Court later affirmed this.In July, the Supreme Court acquitted him of all charges and ordered his immediate release. In a scathing indictment of the prosecution, the Court found the case marred by grave investigative lapses and a poorly conducted trial. It flagged glaring inconsistencies in witness testimonies and noted that even the process of collecting evidence had been compromised.Rakesh’s acquittal is part of a disconcerting pattern. For the third consecutive year, the Supreme Court has not confirmed a single death sentence. This year alone, it has acquitted nine prisoners on death row, commuted five death sentences to life imprisonment, and remanded two cases to the trial courts for fresh consideration, while repeatedly flagging grave investigative and evidentiary lapses. It has also remitted one case to the trial court for the re-examination of a witness.
Files of cases stacked up at The Square Circle Clinic at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.
| Photo Credit:
Aaratrika Bhaumik
Winter is comingA few hundred kilometres away, in a town in Uttar Pradesh, Krishna, 55, sits on a pavement. There hangs the smell of snacks frying, vegetables rotting, and fumes in the air. At his feet lies a thin blanket that another beggar pressed into his hands two nights ago. “Winter is coming,” he says, pulling it to his chest. “I am dreading it.”He picks at the dry skin on his palms, a habit that he has carried from prison into the world outside. His voice drops as his eyes sweep the line of men huddled along the pavement. “I never mention it,” he murmurs. “If they learn I was on death row, they will keep their distance. Out here, you survive only if people stay close. Nights can turn dangerous.”Krishna spent 12 years, eight months, and nine days under the cold shadow of the gallows. His nightmare began 15 years ago, he says, when masked men burst into his two-room mud-brick house and slaughtered his wife and two young children. “I can still hear their screams when I close my eyes. My wife died trying to shield our children,” he says. A single blow to his head left him with an injury so severe that he still feels pain whenever he steps into the sun. “Blood was pouring into my eyes. I thought I would die.”Yet, he somehow managed to scramble over the boundary wall with his 10-year-old son — the only other life spared that night. “I don’t know how we made it out alive,” he says.Days later, the police accused him of murdering his family. “They told me the jeep was taking me to a hospital,” he recalls. “I was bleeding; everything felt blurry. I believed them. But instead of a doctor, it was a prison cell that greeted me.”Opinion | India’s burgeoning death penalty crisisIn 2022, the Supreme Court set him free, observing that the prosecution’s case, which it said was built entirely on an uncorroborated extra-judicial confession, had collapsed under the weight of serious evidentiary lapses. However grave or heinous the offence, a death sentence cannot be sustained without cogent and unimpeachable proof, the Court said.Krishna’s son was brought up by a neighbour, he says. His son is working now but doesn’t financially support or keep in touch with his father.A night that changed everythingIn a quiet residential neighbourhood in a Madhya Pradesh town, 30-year-old Manoj sits outside his modest single-storey home. “I was 18 when I was arrested,” he says. He was accused, along with his father and uncle, of kidnapping and killing a 13-year-old neighbour for ransom.One evening in 2013, barely a fortnight after the boy had gone missing, the police arrived. “They took us away just like that,” he says, snapping his fingers. “No explanation. No evidence shown. In a single night, the only three earning members of my family were gone.”
A man who was on death row and was acquitted by the apex court.
| Photo Credit:
Aaratrika Bhaumik
Left behind were his younger siblings — a 13-year-old brother and a 14-year-old sister. “There was no one left to earn after that,” he says quietly. “My family went days without food.” The teenagers were forced to drop out of school soon after. His sister began working as a household help while his brother took up shifts at a nearby construction site. “That is my biggest regret,” Manoj says. “That they had to abandon their studies because of me.”Manoj spent 10 years behind bars. While his father was sentenced to life imprisonment, he and his uncle were sent to death row. In 2023, the Supreme Court acquitted all three, pointing to glaring investigative lapses, including the police’s failure to examine the original owner of the SIM card allegedly used for the ransom call. The court stressed the urgent need for an investigative code that could prevent prosecutions from collapsing under the weight of policing errors.Botched investigationsAnup Surendranath, executive director of The Square Circle Clinic at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, which has represented six of the death-row prisoners acquitted this year, says, “Courts are finally paying closer attention to crucial details in death penalty cases.” Most death-row prisoners, he notes, hail from marginalised backgrounds and lack effective legal representation, making rigorous appellate scrutiny indispensable. “It is deeply worrying that investigating agencies continue to commit grave procedural violations in the collection of evidence — a pattern the Supreme Court has had to flag time and again,” he adds.Earlier this month, the Supreme Court acquitted Surendra Koli, the prime accused in the 2006 Nithari killings, in the last remaining case where his conviction and life sentence had remained in force. To set him free after nearly two decades, the Court invoked its extraordinary curative jurisdiction to overturn its own earlier ruling. This is a remedy reserved for exceptional situations involving grave procedural lapses or denial of natural justice. The judges called the probe “botched” and noted, among other lapses, that investigators had ignored the possibility of an organ-trade angle flagged earlier by a committee set up by the Ministry of Women and Child Development.Yug Chaudhry, a Mumbai-based senior advocate who specialises in death penalty litigation and who represented Koli, says the case is a cautionary tale about the perils of a justice system vulnerable to media trials and is a compelling indictment of the death penalty itself. “It shows how easily, in heinous offences built on circumstantial evidence, investigations can be manipulated to construct a narrative that evades judicial scrutiny,” he says. “Koli spent 19 years in custody for crimes he did not commit. He was sentenced to death and twice taken to the gallows for execution, only to be saved in the nick of time.”“The consequences of this kind of injustice are devastating,” Yug adds. “He was branded a cannibal. His wife left him. His children grew up, too ashamed to acknowledge their parentage. His brothers were frightened to visit him, lest they be tainted by association. And all of this, for what crime? For the worst crime a person can commit in this country. He was born poor.”Manoj, who spent the entirety of his 20s behind bars, still shivers when his fingers trace the deep scars along his elbows and the side of his neck. “The police hit us brutally in custody,” he says. “My father and uncle, too, were humiliated and assaulted. We kept saying we were innocent, but it felt like speaking into an abyss.”“One day, the police slid a stack of blank sheets across the table and told us to sign,” he says. “They said the torture would get worse if we refused.” His gaze drops, the words thinning to a whisper. “So we signed out of fear. Only later did I understand that those blank pages would be filled in and turned into evidence against us.”“The courts demand exceptionally strong evidence before they agree to send someone to the gallows. But the police often fall short,” says Sulkhan Singh, former Director General of Police, Uttar Pradesh. “In many cases, the handling of evidence is not properly recorded. Every movement of a piece of evidence, from the moment it is collected to when it is presented in court, has to be documented. If this trail breaks anywhere, the evidence loses credibility. This is where the police struggle.”He also points to the Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling in Prakash Singh v. Union of India, which prescribed sweeping police reforms, from separating law-and-order duties from investigation to establishing independent oversight bodies insulated from executive interference. “It has been almost 20 years, yet most of these reforms remain only on paper,” he says.When legal aid is out of reachLike Manoj, Rakesh too found himself weathering an unforgiving system alone. Arrested while his father watched helplessly, he says he did not even know for the longest time that the police had charged him with killing his own family. “I only learned much later what they had accused me of,” he says. Although a legal-aid lawyer had been formally appointed, Rakesh recalls that the counsel failed to appear for several crucial hearings during the trial.Left without any effective representation, his family stepped in. “My father and sister sold whatever we had, jewellery, small pieces of land, to find a lawyer who would actually take up my case,” he says. “After that, nearly everything we owned was gone.”Then came the blow that, he says, “broke something inside” him. His elder brother, a daily-wage labourer, collapsed and died of a heart attack. “All I wanted was to see his face one last time,” Rakesh says. He asked fellow inmates how he might seek temporary release for the funeral rites, and then approached the jail authorities in desperation. “I even went to the jail superintendents, but they refused. They said I would have to move the High Court for it,” he recalls. “I didn’t even know how to begin.”Experiences like his lay bare the chronic lack of accountability within legal-aid institutions, says Anup. “Unfortunately, the prevailing attitude is that simply providing legal aid is enough. It is not. We need mechanisms to review performance and clear quality standards that ensure competent representation. To me, this is an institutional failure,” he adds.For Rakesh, the first time he did not feel invisibilised by the rigours of the system came years after his arrest — during the mitigation process, which documents the life history of the accused to help courts assess their capacity for reformation and determine the appropriate sentence. “The investigators sat with me for hours,” he recalls. “They spoke to my family, to people who had known me since I was a child… It was the first time in years that anyone seemed interested in who I was, beyond the allegations stamped against my name.”Komal, a mitigation investigator with The Square Circle Clinic, recalls preparing Rakesh’s report. “I realised how deeply his faith anchored him, how it helped him endure years of wrongful incarceration,” she says. “He held a steady belief that God would protect him from injustice, and that he had to live a conscientious life in return.”But the work, she adds, comes with profound ethical challenges. “It requires the accused and their families to revisit their lives in painful detail. Often, what they share is deeply private and distressing,” she says. “We are sometimes conflicted, because parts of those disclosures may have to be placed before the court and made public.”Rebuilding livesKrishna says his survival rests on the small generosities of strangers. “Some days, I don’t eat at all,” he admits. After his release, he tried working at a construction site, hoping to stitch together some semblance of a life. But his old head injury stood in the way. “I couldn’t lift anything,” he says. He pulls his blanket tighter around himself. “In prison, I at least had two meals and a roof.”Now back in his village, Rakesh is still learning how to inhabit freedom. “Sometimes it is hard to believe that I am free,” he says. “I can feel the sunshine again. There are no curfews. No one tells me when I can speak to my family.”His home is a single-storey structure with a roof that has slowly caved in after years of neglect. A straw cot lies in the courtyard for his father. One section of the outer wall has crumbled. “Now that I have a second chance at life, I want to rebuild that wall,” Rakesh says. “I hardly spend on myself. I save every rupee”. Soon after his release, he found work as a daily-wage labourer.“Compensation should be given to people like us so that we can begin rebuilding our lives,” he says. “The years won’t come back, the humiliation won’t disappear. But compensation can soften the blow a little and remind the police that throwing someone behind bars cannot come without consequences.”India has no statute recognising a right to compensation for wrongful convictions. In October, the Supreme Court sought the Centre’s response to three petitions filed by former death-row prisoners who spent decades in incarceration before being acquitted earlier this year. Citing a violation of constitutional guarantees, they are now seeking compensation for the years lost.(The names of former death-row prisoners and their family members have been changed to protect their identities)
已发布: 2025-11-29 00:52:00
来源: www.thehindu.com
