बेबाक · Editorial
Liberty and Punishment: The Even Hand the Courts Owe Every Accused
From a life term in the 2020 Delhi riots to interim bail in the TASMAC case, recent orders test whether liberty and punishment follow law, not the identity of the accused.
A week in the docket
Recent court orders, read together, sketch the strain and promise of India's criminal justice system. A Delhi court sentenced a former municipal councillor and four others to life imprisonment for the 2020 killing of Intelligence Bureau staffer Ankit Sharma, rejecting the death penalty. The Supreme Court granted interim anticipatory bail in the TASMAC corruption case, cancelled the bail of Sonam Raghuvanshi in the Raja Raghuvanshi murder case with a three-week surrender order, and observed that cryptic bail orders need not be revisited. Different benches, different accused, one shared question: does the law apply the same to all?
The core tension
Two constitutional values pull against each other in every one of these files. The first is liberty: an accused is presumed innocent, and freedom cannot hinge, as the Supreme Court put it, on the inaccuracy of a court, but on the strength of the prosecution's case. The second is accountability: victims and the state have a stake in seeing serious crime prosecuted to conviction. Bail is not acquittal, and a life term is not vengeance. The system earns legitimacy only when both doors — to liberty and to punishment — are opened by evidence, never by the office, notoriety or public profile of the person standing at them.
Steel-manning both sides
Those alarmed by some bail orders have a point worth stating at full strength: interim protection for accused persons with public standing can deepen the perception of a two-tier system if similar reasoning is not visible in less noticed cases. Those who defend the orders answer, with equal force, that the remedy for a weak bail order is a better-reasoned one, not the reflex of incarceration — and that the Supreme Court cancelled bail this very week where surrender was warranted. Both concerns matter. The honest reading is that consistency, not severity or leniency, is the standard to which the judiciary must be held.
What the evidence shows
The specifics cut against easy narratives. In the Ankit Sharma case, the trial court refused the death penalty on the reasoned ground that the prosecution had failed to establish that the five convicts were beyond reformation. In the Raja Raghuvanshi murder case, the Supreme Court cancelled Sonam Raghuvanshi's bail and directed her to surrender within three weeks. In the TASMAC corruption case, it made interim protection conditional on cooperation with the investigation. And its remark that liberty rests on the prosecution's case, not the drafting of an order, is a principle, not a favour. Across these matters, the courts moved in more than one direction — the mark of case-by-case adjudication, not a fixed thumb on the scale.
The verdict
The rule of law applies to everyone — the powerful and the anonymous, the accused in a riot murder case and the accused in a corruption probe alike. On that standard, the week is neither scandal nor triumph; it is a reminder of unfinished work. Reasoned, uniform bail jurisprudence is the quiet infrastructure of a free republic, and it frays when orders are cryptic, when surrender appears uneven, or when the public suspects that public position buys liberty. The judiciary's own insistence this week on reasoning over reflex is the right instinct. It must now be applied with the same rigour to the undertrial no newsroom names as to the accused every newsroom watches.
The way forward
The path is procedural, not rhetorical. Bail orders should carry short, published reasons tied to the prosecution's material, so liberty never appears to depend on the inaccuracy or brevity of a court order. Sentencing should continue to rest, as in the Sharma case, on the recorded finding of whether reformation is possible, rather than on public mood. Investigating agencies must convert conditional bail into diligent investigation instead of indefinite pendency. And the higher courts should keep publishing the doctrinal spine of these decisions, so the district judge deciding an unwatched case has the same guidance as the bench deciding a headline one. Equal law, evenly reasoned, is the only durable reform.
Liberty cannot depend on the identity of the person in the dock, nor punishment on the passions of the moment.
Your Constitutional Rights
What the Constitution guarantees in this storyAn arrested person must be told the grounds of arrest, may consult a lawyer of their choice, and must be produced before a magistrate within 24 hours.
Fundamental RightNo person shall be deprived of life or personal liberty except by a fair, just and reasonable procedure established by law — read by the courts to include dignity, privacy, health, a clean environment and livelihood.
Fundamental RightNo one can be convicted under a retrospective law, punished twice for the same offence, or compelled to be a witness against themselves.
Fundamental RightThe State shall take steps to separate the judiciary from the executive in the public services.
Directive PrincipleWhat this editorial rests on
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