"Has there been justice for Reeva? Has Oscar served enough time? There can never be justice if your loved one is never coming back, and no amount of time served will bring Reeva back. We, who remain behind, are the ones serving a life sentence."
– June Steenkamp, when her daughter Reeva’s murderer, Paralympian athlete Oscar Pistorius, was released to home confinement after just eight and a half years in jail
Is it fair that the loved ones of murder victims should serve a lifetime of grief and suffering while the murderer revels in the life he forever deprived his victim of after just a few years in jail? True justice in the case of murder is not possible on earth as yet, but can we make our feeble attempts to make amends to the relatives of the murdered less painful than they are now?
Apart from being as far from true justice for the loss of a loved one, the sentence of imprisonment for life seems to have become the means for murderers to wriggle out of the retaliatory death that fairness requires and to stay alive till friends and the law can get them out of jail and they can continue living and enjoying life like they did nothing amiss.
The premature release of life-term convicts and the frequent questionable, often politically driven, paroles given to them highlight what seems like a major flaw of the sentence of imprisonment for life: the fact that it consigns the grieving relatives of a murdered person to a lifetime of agony and sorrow while letting the murderer off with a gentle slap on the wrist. Incarceration for life has never been seen as making amends for the loss of a loved one deprived of life forever, but the way the policy serves today to privilege the life of the murderer over the suffering of victims suggests perhaps that we no more think that murder is the gravest crime imaginable to humans and one to be punished with as much harshness as the forcible taking of fragile human life deserves.
Many people who have studied the matter acknowledge that the plight of victims of major crimes has largely been ignored when compared with the earnest sympathy that, ironically, criminals sentenced to life imprisonment seem to get. Three recent cases, in the news lately, illustrate how hard done by victims of major crimes must feel over the coddling that convicted murderers receive.
In South Africa, Oscar Pistorius, the celebrated Paralympian with the prosthetic running blades, convicted of murdering his 22-year-old girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, was released in January 2024, after eight and a half years in jail, to spend the rest of his 13-year jail term in the comfort and comparative luxury of home confinement. In Gujarat, 11 gang-rapists who murdered 14 Muslims during the riots of 2002 (the Bilkis Bano case) enjoyed almost three years of parole and furlough (well over a thousand days on average) before being prematurely released, in August 2022, after some 15 years in jail. (Bilkis’s 3-year-old daughter, Saleha, was among the 14 relatives killed, her little head smashed against the ground. Bilkis was gang-raped, while her mother, two sisters, two aunts and cousins were raped before being killed, along with her two brothers and two uncles, some 14 relatives in all. Several bodies were found decapitated later, to hinder identification.
The convicts were felicitated with garlands round their necks and mithai sweetening their mouths when they re-entered normal life. Talk of dancing on the graves of your victims! (Mercifully, they have now been re-jailed, but not before having enjoyed a further reprieve from jail of a year and a half while out on the fraudulently obtained ‘premature release’ (a more unironically truthful officialism could not have been thought up!). Just a few days later, two of the convicts received several days of parole, for a wedding and a funeral!
Further up north in Haryana, Gurmeet Saint Ram Rahim Singh, sentenced to 20 years for two rapes and a life term for his involvement in a murder, gets a free pass out of jail every few months mainly before elections (some nine parole breaks in four years for a total of 234 days so far, and counting). He spends these holidays cutting birthday cakes with huge swords and appearing happily on YouTube videos promoting the Dera Sacha Sauda cult he heads.
As for the ‘people left behind’ of June Steenkamp’s vivid coinage, well, what can one say? You lost your loved ones, dear, tough luck, but please accept our heartfelt sympathies. Yeah, yeah, they have been robbed of a huge chunk of their life (Reeva 43 years, Saleha all of 67), and the murderer is living it up, with all those parole breaks and furloughs and the prospect of unrestrained freedom in just a few years. We can imagine your suffering, the grief and torment your whole life long, but what to do, life is like this. Stay strong.
So, on the one side we have the murderer, who usually gets a life sentence in India, which must be seen as a solid win for him right away. In countries which still think a life for a life is the right response to murder, he would have been killed without too much demur and delay. And serve him right too, you would think, when you consider how a ‘life sentence’ today seems like society’s ruse to put one over the victims and their kin and spare the murderer’s life. A puny fine (a princely sum of, say, Rs10,000 ) accompanies the sentence and you spend 14 years in jail (actually much less, with jail time considerably shortened for good behaviour, parole, furlough, the works), and then the rest of your life is yours to do with as you wish, your destruction of another life completely forgotten.
And in jail, of course, life can be as good as life outside, if you are a privileged prisoner, that is, if you are loaded and have influential friends in the right places. Access to mobiles, a TV to watch IPL, food from outside (“Hello Zomato”), drinks, drugs, playing card sessions with fellow-inmates, friends dropping in often, even girl-friends…. What’s not to like about life in jail, right? Gurmeet Ram Rahim left for his latest parole in January in a motorcade of some half a dozen swanky cars!
The mortally wounded, on the other hand, must wonder about a justice where it is they who suffer torment and agony their whole lives while their daughter’s murderer lives it up, carefree and unrepentant. You wonder about a verdict which seems to punish the victims more than the offender. Something about the murder not being heinous enough to merit a stricter sentence, perhaps even the death penalty if it came to that, because it was not done in the most horrifying, or the “rarest of the rare”, manner of killing someone!
Isn’t murder, any murder, barbaric enough already? Could there be anything more terrible than depriving someone of what may be considered the rarest of rare experiences to be found in the universe? We have yet to discover sentient life, fragile and precious, anywhere else in the universe, but we don’t think violently snuffing out an instance of this miracle terrible enough for our liking?
A beloved daughter or son, a piece of your own flesh and blood, is violently taken away from the life you are in together, but society appears to enable the murderer to live on and thrive as though he has done nothing too grave, and there is nothing you can do about it. No justice in this life, no closure as long as you live, the forever crippled, the walking dead.
The murderers, on the other hand, seem to be doing very well for themselves, thank you. First, and most importantly, their life has been spared; the life sentence is society’s preferred humane alternative to the savage death penalty as punishment for murder. (What a merciful gift! “Long live the life sentence!”) Now there’s just 14 years to the freedom of normal life, and these happily interspersed with welcome breaks of, cumulatively, almost three years, to soften the rigours of life in jail. As for the petty, so-called punitive fine, trifling though it is compared with the actual loss of life and the human life value you would need to make amends for in a just world, the benevolent state does not insist on cash. You have the option of paying it in the form of a few more months spent in jail instead. It seems some 90 per cent of fines for murder in Mumbai are cancelled out this way. Fun titbit: The 11 Gujarati rapists and killers, fraudulently released prematurely, actually walked out of jail without paying, or making good through added jail time, the paltry fine of Rs34,000 imposed on them!
How about any form of reparation, or restitution, for murder at all then? What restitution, what reparation? Are you crazy? There is no need to make the slightest amends for not only the life you took but also the crores in reparation a fair valuation of the loss would have you pay. But don’t victim families now get compensation of some two lakh rupees? Surely the murderer at least pays this little pittance? Relax your little head, my darling killer, it is all taken care of for you, our mai-baap sarkar will simply dip into public funds and pay it for you through your state’s scheme of compensation for victims of major crimes. (In Maharashtra it is known as the Manodhairya scheme.) In other words, you just do the murder and relax in jail, society will go through the motions of making amends for everything: through ‘life imprisonment’ of a few years for, say, all of the 45 years you took out of someone’s life, by adjusting the petty, punitive fine against a few more months added to your jail term, by letting you completely off the hook for the so-called compensation amount, and, the cherry on top, by releasing you prematurely from jail.
As for the retributory punishment that the life sentence of imprisonment is supposed to be, relax some more. No “rotting in jail for the rest of your life” for you. You may have fatally interrupted someone’s life of most probably 70-odd years, but, in return you will be kept in prison for, at most, a total of just 11 years. That is, from the ‘life’ sentence of 14-odd years, you get almost three years of normal life handed back to you through breaks from jail for parole, furlough, sick leave, Covid leave, special furloughs, open jail, the works. Remember, a life sentence is one in name only. In the meanwhile, you can appeal your sentence and, luck willing, get bail, and then you can stay out of jail till your case comes up for hearing, which can take many months, or if you are lucky, even a year or two. This is a lucky bonus the system throws your way now and then!
Take the case of the convicted in the Soumya Viswanathan case. The sentence of life imprisonment, imposed in January on the murderers of this 25-year-old woman from Delhi, has already been suspended, pending the hearing of their appeal against the verdict. Mercifully, only one of the four convicts has actually been released, the other three having had to stay in jail over another murder they were involved in. In other words, seasoned gangsters, who were also convicted of another horrific murder - two even given the death penalty in the lower court for it, which the High Court later commuted to life imprisonment - have been given the benefit of the doubt over the trial court’s studied decision in the matter! Their sentence has been suspended mainly because, the judge said, they had already served 14 years in jail when they were convicted of Soumya’s murder. Our courts set the bar very low when it comes to justice for murder, it seems! And, thus, the essence of a life sentence, which is punishment through imprisonment, is undermined by this dodge.
In the case of Bilkis Bano, too, the Gujarat government appeared to be working on behalf of the murderers and rapists when it released them prematurely in 2022 while keeping Bilkis in the dark about it. In other words, they pulled a fast one on Bilkis; she was completely blindsided when the convicts were released on Independence Day. A barbaric gang-rape and mass murders had become a matter of impersonal, and illegally covert, transactions between state and criminals, the wronged victim nowhere in the picture. The same government has now had the temerity to petition the Supreme Court to expunge the adverse remarks made against it over its role in the fraudulent early release.
It is clear the odds don’t favour the victims of major crimes. The judiciary, to its credit, has done its bit to hold the line against the executive’s cavalier shortening of the life sentence, asserting unequivocally that life imprisonment implies incarceration for the whole of the offender’s life and not just the 14 years now normalised as a ‘life sentence’. This seems, though, like a rear-guard manoeuvre at best, given the political pressure constantly bearing down on the life term. Pushing back against any further reduction apart, some major tweaks are called for in the entire life sentence regime if we are to come anywhere close to adequately fulfilling any of the four aims of criminal justice – of punishing, deterring and reforming offenders, and, principally, of compensating victims fairly.
In the matter of just recompense to victims, for instance, it appears that life is certainly not equal to life, not in the years of life lost that the offender must make amends for, nor in the earnings lost by the victim and her family during what would have been the remainder of her working life. Three-year-old Saleha Bano had all of 67 years snatched from her, Soumya 45, and Reeva 43 (life expectancy for women being 70 years in India, 65 in South Africa). How does a mere 11 years of jail time (taking paroles and furloughs and other holidays into account) compare with an entire life forever taken away from someone? How much exactly is a life taken away prematurely worth? As matters stand now, it is worth only the years we jail murderers for and a fine which need not be paid, with absolutely no accounting for the trauma and other loss victims, mainly bereaved relatives, undergo their whole lives.
Soumya Viswanathan, for instance, had 35 years of working life to look forward to. In the course of her career as a TV news producer she would have easily earned over a crore of rupees during her lifetime, given a minimum monthly salary of Rs20,000 and modest annual raises over the years. The court has allotted her parents Rs 12 lakh by way of fine, and only because it was an organised crime and some five killers were involved. If a lone killer had done the deed, the fine would have stopped at, say, Rs50,000, and no further apology.
How much fairer, perhaps, would it be if murderers were made to atone for their crime by actually making good at least the money value of their victims’ lost earnings, even if it takes them the rest of their life to do so? Would a human life taken away prematurely and violently be worth any less?
Though we like to think that human life is priceless and its value unquantifiable, we do assign it a monetary value for limited, earthly purposes. In the realm of criminal justice, for instance, we give it a value, even if too conservatively, in terms of the currencies of time (jail time) and money (the punitive fine and a little compensation, if any). The present valuation, or undervaluation, of life, though, tends to massively short-change victims and, perhaps, further exacerbates their suffering. To the existential pain of what could be the eternal loss (No!) of a loved one is added the socially-induced torment flowing from letting the murderer off easy with a light life term, pampering him through extended holidays from jail, and excusing him the rigours of actual atonement for his crime.
It beggars belief that it is you and me, ordinary law-abiding citizens, who fund the compensation scheme for victims of major crimes. To think that it is us, innocent bystanders, and not the actual offenders, who paid Bilkis Bano the compensation of some 50 or 70 lakh rupees for her gang-rape, the murder of her 3-year-old daughter and the rape and murder of her other relatives (14 in all), while the actual criminals sat in jail savouring the reprieve of sweet life that society granted them! Murder, it seems, doesn’t cost anything at all in India for offenders, but a whole lot for the rest of us.
A more realistic attitude towards restitution could begin by taking another look at the rationale (whatever it may be at present) for the quantum of the punitive fine and the recently-introduced compensation scheme for victims of murder and other major crimes. The fine certainly calls for drastic revision from the laughable token (Rs10,000 on average, in Maharashtra, Rs50,000 in Delhi) that is embarrassingly levied now, as though signalling society’s assumption that murder is nothing life-changing, just a run-of-the-mill crime worth, at most, someone’s salary for a month.
A good start at a corrective would be to apply a measure like the ‘human life value’ formula, utilised by insurance companies, when calculating the quantum of compensation. This would not come anywhere close to the economic worth of a human life, of course, but would certainly be a notch above the present, niggardly alternative.
Which brings us to the reform and rehabilitation that it is expected that 14 years of incarceration should bring about. Does the offender realise at last the gravity of his crime given how miraculous and, therefore, precious, human life is in the universe? Does he accept that in a just world he would really be dead, and that he is beholden to society for letting him continue enjoying the same life he so cruelly deprived someone else of? In other words, is he really and truly sorry for his offence? Or, does he simply move on with his life like the murder is so much water under the bridge now, while the bereaved relatives of the victim suffer pain and suffering forever? Is this agony of the victims accounted for in the life sentence in some way, perhaps?
As we have just seen, not at all.
There can be no justice on earth for murder, but should we behave like the torment heaped (by society) on bereaved relatives after a life sentence is also a part of human reality?Should we be rubbing salt in victims’ wounds by letting murderers revel, without the slightest remorse, in the very life they casually deprived our loved ones of? While we show exemplary solicitude for the well-being of lifers, some of this concern perhaps needs to be directed towards the life-long trauma, so eloquently articulated by June Steenkamp, that the victims of their crime undergo. How much longer can the bereaved aggrieved accept the lack of fairness in the treatment they receive from the state as compared with criminals and law-breakers?
The continuing devaluation of human life, seen in how lightly we deal with murder and murderers, must surely add up one day to people figuring out that justice is, perhaps, not given, but taken. Frustrated with society’s casualness towards their pain, victims could soon re-embrace the idea that the rough justice that revenge provides may be the best response after all to the murder of their loved one. In other words, justified vengeance that comes as close to fair amends as possible on earth! No more resenting life’s unfairness for the rest of our lives, no more railing at how the universe has let us down! With one bold stroke, shrug off the agony and the suffering! No longer paralysed victims but galvanised avengers and justice-seekers! If only to ensure some degree of amends for a loved one cruelly taken from us too soon, and, more tragically, robbed of an experience together that could turn out to have been our one and only experience of the strange and wondrous miracle that is life on earth.
Linken Fernandes is an independent journalist and the author of The Sun In Her Hair (A True Account) and Nine Short Stories. The True Account deals with the aftermath of his daughter’s murder. Views are personal.