Nine policemen sentenced to death in India over Covid custody killings

A court in Madurai sentenced nine Tamil Nadu police officers to death for torturing a father and son to death after arresting them for keeping a mobile accessories shop open past an 8 PM COVID-19 curfew, in what is believed to be the most far-reaching custodial murder conviction ever handed down against police personnel in India.

Judge G. Muthukumaran of the First Additional District and Sessions Court classified the killings as "rarest of rare" and described them as "cold-blooded," ruling that life imprisonment would not serve as an adequate deterrent. He noted that the officers, obligated to maintain law and order, had themselves acted against the law and brutally assaulted the father and son. The court also ordered the nine convicted officers to pay a combined fine of Rs 1.40 crore, approximately £130,000, as compensation to the victims' families.

The two men died in June 2020, days after officers at the Sathankulam police station in Thoothukudi district, Tamil Nadu, arrested P. Jayaraj, then aged 58, for the alleged curfew breach. His son J. Bennix, 31, was detained after going to the station to check on his father and being held when he objected to seeing Jayaraj beaten. Both were subjected to approximately seven hours of torture on the night of June 20, 2020. A post-mortem examination found Jayaraj had sustained at least 17 injuries. The CBI's chargesheet stated the officers "inflicted several injuries knowing well that they would die of such injuries." Bennix died on June 22 at Kovilpatti General Hospital; his father died the following day.

The Madras High Court took suo motu cognisance of the deaths and declared a prima facie case of murder, prompting the transfer of the investigation from state CB-CID to the Central Bureau of Investigation. Ten officers were originally arrested; one died of COVID-19 before the trial concluded. The case passed through five Sessions judges over more than five years before Muthukumaran convicted all nine on March 23, 2026. The officers sentenced to death are Inspector S. Sridhar, Sub-Inspectors P. Raghu Ganesh and K. Balakrishnan, Head Constables S. Murugan and A. Samadurai, and Constables M. Muthuraj, S. Chelladurai, X. Thomas Francis and S. Veilumuthu. The convicts are expected to appeal to the Madras High Court.

The verdict arrives against a damning statistical record. Between 1999 and 2023, 2,253 people died in Indian police custody, averaging roughly 90 per year. In the six years between 2016-17 and 2021-22, the country recorded 11,419 custodial deaths, more than five per day. Between 2018 and 2021, not a single police official was convicted for a custodial death. India has already recorded 170 custodial deaths in just the first 74 days of 2026.

That record defines the limits of what one verdict can achieve. The "rarest of rare" classification signals judicial recognition that these nine officers acted with exceptional brutality; the statistics confirm that custodial deaths themselves are not exceptional at all. Critics argue that focusing the accountability conversation on capital punishment risks displacing harder questions about unchecked police discretion, inadequate detention oversight, and near-total prosecution immunity. For a family that spent six years pursuing justice for Jayaraj and Bennix, the death sentences mark an endpoint. For Indian policing culture, they are, at best, a beginning.