Protector can’t adopt brutality: Top court on custodial torture
THE COURT WAS DEALING WITH APPEALS FILED BY TWO RETIRED ODISHA COPS CONVICTED OF TORTURING A MAN IN CUSTODY, LEADING TO HIS DEATH
NEW DELHI: Beating a person in a police station causes a sense of fear in society, is a matter of great public concern and such brutality on the part of the police cannot be condoned, the Supreme Court said Thursday.
The court was dealing with appeals filed by two retired policemen from Odisha who were convicted of torturing a man in custody, leading to his death. The offence was committed on May 4, 1985 and the Orissa high court on November 9, 2020 reduced the jail sentences awarded to the two to one year of simple imprisonment for the crime of causing hurt under section 324 of Indian Penal Code.
The policemen, Pravat Chandra Mohanty and Pratap Kumar Choudhury, now over 75 years of age, made an abortive last-ditch attempt in the Supreme Court to erase the criminal taint on them and instead offered to pay an additional compensation of ₹3.5 lakh each to the family of the person they were convicted of killing. The policemen had deposited ₹3 lakh each in compensation for the person’s family on a direction passed by the HC. But this amount was found to be inadequate by the top court.
A bench of justices Ashok Bhushan and Ajay Rastogi said: “People go to the police station with the hope that their person and property will be protected by the police and injustice and offence committed on them shall be redressed and the guilty be punished. When the protector of people and society himself adopts brutality and inhumanly beat the person who comes to the police station, it is a matter of great public concern.”
The officers in question were the station in-charge and senior inspector at Purighat police station. The bench noted that the beating of a person in the police station was a matter of concern and causes a “sense of fear in the entire society”. Such offences, in the court’s view, should not be compounded on payment of compensation. “The present is a case where the accused who were police officers, one of them being in-charge of station and other Senior Inspector have themselves brutally beaten the deceased, who died the same night. Their offences cannot be compounded by the Court in exercise of Section 320(2) read with subsection (5) of the Code of Criminal Procedure. We, thus, reject the prayer of the appellants to compound the offence.”
The court accepted the offer of additional compensation and directed the money to be distributed equally among their victim’s four sons or legal heirs. Considering their old age, the bench reduced their punishment from one year’s imprisonment to six months. Glancing through the prosecution records describing the crime committed by the accused policemen, the apex court said, “The custodial violence on the deceased which led to the death is abhorrent and not acceptable in the civilized society. The offence committed by the accused is crime not against the deceased alone but was against humanity...”