The headlines are predictably triumphant. Nine policemen in Tamil Nadu have been sentenced to death for the 2020 custodial torture and murder of P. Jayaraj and his son J. Beniks. The public is cheering. The media is painting this as a victory for "justice."
They are wrong. For a deeper dive into similar topics, we suggest: this related article.
This isn’t a victory. It’s a spectacular failure of imagination and a desperate attempt by the Indian judiciary to apply a Band-Aid to a systemic hemorrhage. By focusing on the extreme punishment of individuals, we are ignoring the institutional machinery that makes such brutality inevitable. We are hanging the symptoms while the disease thrives.
The Lazy Consensus of Individual Villainy
The mainstream narrative treats the Sathankulam case as an anomaly—a few "bad apples" who went rogue during a high-stress pandemic lockdown. This perspective is dangerously naive. It suggests that if we simply remove these nine men from the earth, the problem of custodial violence evaporates. For additional details on this development, detailed reporting is available on NPR.
I have spent years analyzing the intersection of executive power and human rights. I can tell you that these men didn't act in a vacuum. They acted within a culture of "encounter killings" and "lathi-charge" governance that is actively encouraged by the state until it becomes a PR liability.
When you sentence nine officers to death, you aren't fixing the police. You are giving the state a convenient scapegoat. The government gets to say, "See? The system works," while the same structural incentives that led to the deaths of Jayaraj and Beniks remain perfectly intact.
Why the Death Penalty is a Tactical Error
The knee-jerk reaction to a heinous crime is to demand the ultimate penalty. But in the context of police reform, the death penalty is counter-productive. It creates a "fortress mentality" within the force.
When the stakes are life or death, the blue wall of silence doesn't just get thicker; it becomes impenetrable. Instead of fostering an environment where junior officers feel empowered to report the excesses of their seniors, this verdict ensures that every officer will lie, hide evidence, and intimidate witnesses to avoid the gallows. We are trading the possibility of long-term transparency for a moment of short-term vengeance.
The Myth of Deterrence
"People Also Ask" if the death penalty will stop custodial torture. The answer is a resounding no.
If the fear of death stopped crime, the IPC would have eradicated murder decades ago. In the specific ecosystem of Indian policing, deterrence fails because the "conviction" is the outlier, not the crime. According to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, hundreds of custodial deaths are reported annually, yet the number of policemen actually convicted is statistically microscopic.
These nine men didn't torture Jayaraj and Beniks because they weren't afraid of the death penalty. They did it because they were 100% certain they would never be charged. They were wrong this time because the public outcry reached a fever pitch, but "justice by viral outrage" is not a functional legal system.
The Nuance the Media Missed: The Pressure Cooker
Let’s talk about the uncomfortable truth. The Indian police force is overworked, under-trained, and politically weaponized.
Imagine a scenario where a local station is under immense pressure from political masters to enforce "total lockdowns" with zero resources and infinite expectations. The line between "maintaining order" and "physical domination" blurs until it disappears.
- Training: Most constables receive more training in drill and ceremony than in human rights or modern interrogation techniques.
- Hours: 14-hour shifts are the norm, not the exception.
- Psychology: There is zero mental health support for men and women who are daily witnesses to the worst parts of humanity.
By ignoring these factors and simply reaching for the hangman's noose, we ensure that the next set of officers placed in that same pressure cooker will eventually snap in the same way.
Reforming the Un-Reformable
If you actually want to stop people from dying in police stations, stop cheering for executions and start demanding these three things:
- Functional Autonomy: Decouple the police from the direct control of local politicians. As long as a Transfer is used as a weapon against "difficult" officers, the police will serve the powerful, not the law.
- Mandatory Body Cams and Geo-Fencing: Technology is harder to bribe than a magistrate. Every second of an interaction inside a station must be recorded on a server the local SHO cannot access.
- The End of Immunity: We need to dismantle the legal protections that require "government sanction" to prosecute an officer. If they break the law, they should face the law like any other citizen—not as a protected class of the state.
The High Cost of Vengeance
The Sathankulam verdict feels good. It satisfies a primal urge for retribution. But don't mistake that feeling for progress.
Every time we execute an official for a systemic failure, we lose the chance to interrogate the system itself. We bury the evidence of institutional rot with the bodies of the condemned. We are participating in a performance of justice that allows the architects of this culture—the politicians and the high-ranking bureaucrats—to walk away clean.
Stop asking for more hangings. Start asking why the police are still governed by a colonial-era act designed to suppress a population rather than protect a citizenry.
The death of Jayaraj and Beniks was a tragedy. The execution of nine men is a distraction. The real crime is that tomorrow morning, another man will be picked up for a minor infraction, and the culture that killed Beniks will be there waiting for him, completely unchanged by this verdict.
Demand a system that doesn't need a hangman to prove it's working.
