A regional trial court in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu announced its verdict in a case of torture and custodial death against nine police officers belonging to the state’s police department, according to a report by the BBC.

The policemen were all awarded death sentences as an exemplary punishment in a case which became a national sensation as a symbol of police brutality and need for reform in India’s law enforcement apparatus at the regional level.

The father-son victim duo P Jayaraj and his son J Benicks were picked up by the police for allegedly keeping their mobile phone shop open beyond the time permitted during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown norms in India. According to a report by NDTV the allegation was later established to be false during the trial thus disqualifying any legal reason for the police to detain the victims in the first place. Allegedly Jayaraj had an altercation with some of the police officers when they arrived at his shop to shut it down citing COVID lockdown rules.

As the altercation escalated, Jayaraj’s son Benicks tried to intervene and was involved in a scuffle with the police after which they were both taken to the police station by the police and tortured. According to witness testimony and other facts established during the trial the victims were subjected to grave physical and psychological abuse including torture that the perpetrators knew would surely result in the victims's death.

The victims were allegedly stripped, beaten and tortured overnight by the policemen in the station, while also being sodomised with bamboo batons seen as ubiquitous in the hands of police officers in India as a weapon used in crowd control.

As a psychological morale-breaking act the assault was carried out against each victim in front of the other. After the assault, in their bloodied state the victims were also forced to clean their own wounds by the police officers.

According to testimony by a female police officer belonging to the police station where the torture was committed, she had seen tables and batons with blood on them at the station in the morning after the detentions.

The CCTV recording of the police station for the day and night of June 19 2020 when the torture allegedly took place wasn’t recovered by the investigating authorities but the testimony of three separate witnesses was used to establish the facts of the case by the prosecution.

As the case became a political and public outrage issue and had grave implications attached to it because of the purported abuse of authority, the Madras high court had directed one of India’s union level apex investigative and law enforcement agencies, the Central Bureau of Investigation(CBI) to take over the investigation from its state level counterpart.

The trial court which announced the death sentences acknowledged the welcome intervention of the High Court and remarked that if not for their intervention and direction for the CBI to investigate, “truth regarding the incident would have been buried along with the mortal remains of the duo.”

As cited in a report by the Times of India, the trial court bench of Justice G. Muthukumaran termed the crime an act of vengeance by the perpetrators and that "where there is power, there should be responsibility. The incident was an attack on human rights."

Justice Muthukumaran further said that “Those who should protect the public have acted in such a manner by misusing their power. This was the case of fencing eating the crops.” According to the NDTV report Justice Muthukumaran also broke the nib of his pen, which alongside the award of a death sentence is symbolic of the gravity of the matter upon which the court ruled.

While it is technically within the power of the Indian judiciary to award a death sentence to perpetrators convicted of a grave and heinous crime, these penalties are in reality reserved for the rarest of cases.