On April 6, the Madurai District Court awarded the death penalty to nine policemen who had been held guilty of the custodial torture and murders of P Jayaraj and his son J Benicks, residents of Sathankulam, in Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudi district.

The two had been killed in June 2020, when the Covid-19 lockdown was in force. The police claimed that they had been arrested because they had kept their mobile phone shop open past curfew hours. In the first information report against the two men, the police claimed that they had injured themselves after rolling on the ground and attributed their deaths to fever and high blood pressure.

A Central Bureau of Investigation probe found that the police’s claims were false. Jayaraj and Benicks had been sexually and physically assaulted, and had been murdered, the investigation concluded.

But while the verdict against the policemen brings some closure to the case for the moment, one dimension of it remains relatively unexamined: the passive or active role of the other authorities in these crimes.

When the police arrest an individual, they are mandated to put them through a medical examination and present them before a magistrate within 24 hours.

The morning after Jayaraj and Benicks were tortured, they were examined by a doctor...

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