Indian court sentences nine police officers to death over 2020 custodial killings

Nine police officers in India’s Tamil Nadu state have been sentenced to death over the custodial killings of a father and son detained during the 2020 Covid lockdown, in a rare ruling that a judge described as meeting the country’s “rarest of the rare” threshold.

According to The Independent, the victims—P Jeyaraj, 58, and his son J Benicks, 31—were taken to the Sattankulam police station after officers accused them of keeping their mobile phone shop open past permitted hours. Investigators later said the allegation was unfounded. The men died within days.

The case drew national attention in 2020 because it combined a familiar pattern—arrest over a minor alleged violation—with an unusually detailed account of what happened behind a station door. Prosecutors said the two were stripped and tortured through the night, often in front of each other. The court accepted the argument that the violence was deliberate and retaliatory, not incidental, and that officers then tried to erase traces of the assault, including forcing the victims to clean their own blood and destroying evidence.

India retains capital punishment but uses it sparingly; the last executions were carried out in 2020. Death sentences are more common than executions, and appeals can take years. That time lag matters in cases involving state agents: a long appellate runway often shifts attention away from the original abuse and toward procedure, while the officers remain embedded in a system that relies on colleagues to testify, preserve records and enforce discipline.

The investigation itself illustrates how accountability tends to arrive only when the normal chain of command becomes politically costly. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) took over after public pressure, and concluded the officers tortured the pair to “teach them a lesson,” The Independent reports. Ten officers were originally charged; one died during the trial after contracting Covid, leaving nine to be convicted last month of murder, criminal conspiracy and destruction of evidence.

The court also imposed fines totalling more than 10 million rupees (about £81,000). But the sums are small compared with the institutional value of coercive policing in India, where rights groups have long documented high numbers of custodial deaths and low rates of successful prosecution. A death sentence signals that a line was crossed, yet it also underscores that most similar cases never reach a courtroom with intact evidence.

Jeyaraj and Benicks were arrested over shop hours during a lockdown. The court’s judgment turned on what happened after the station gates closed.