&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "Death penalty for nine cops in Tamil Nadu's father-son custodial torture, death")
A district court in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, awarded death penalty to nine police personnel in connection with the custodial torture and resultant death of a father-son duo in the year 2020. The gruesome crime dates back to June 2020, when police personnel in Sathankulam, Thoothukudi district, took shopkeepers Jeyaraj and Benicks into custody for allegedly having violated COVID-19 lockdown norms. The father-son duo was brutally beaten in custody, left with severe injuries that led to their death in the following days.
The nine police personnel are: Inspector Sridhar; Sub-Inspectors Balakrishnan and Raghu Ganesh; and Murugan, Samadurai, Muthuraja, Chelladurai, Thomas Francis, and Veilumuthu.
Observing that the case was an extremely rare one, the Judge, G Muthukumaran stated that the police personnel entrusted with upholding law and order, had themselves acted against the law. It was noted that the father-son due did not have any criminal case against them and that they were brutally assaulted while in police custody. The court also ordered a total compensation of Rs 1.40 crore, which the nine police personnel are required to pay to the bereaved family. The judge stressed that the punishment must be severe enough to ensure such horrors never recur.
The court held that this was a clear case of custodial violence, with evidence pointing out that the father and son were brutally assaulted while in police custody. Inspector Sridhar was found to have instigated the assault, with other personnel participating in the custodial violence and the cover-up attempt that followed.
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The case was initially probed by Tamil Nadu's CB-CID. Later, India's top probe agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation(CBI) took over, based on directions from the Madras High Court. Over a 100 witnesses were examined in connection with this case, over the last five years. This incident and the chilling details that emerged, triggered massive outage at the time and drew further attention to the horrors of custodial violence that common people could be subject to.
