In 2011, a serving member of the disciplined forces was accused of raping a minor, the young daughter of an officer. Fifteen years later, he is out on bail. Nothing in the evidence set him free. The delay did, in the courtroom and in the department's own proceedings, as the case moved from one adjournment to the next while the family waited.
I think about that case whenever the country asks, after another horrifying crime, whether our laws are harsh enough. They are. What that case showed me is a different kind of failure: the law was severe, but it was not prompt.
A spate of cases, and the Supreme Court's question
The question is pressing this month. On September 28, 2026, the Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of a spate of sexual-assault cases in Delhi-NCR, including the alleged gangrape and murder of a teenage girl in Swarup Nagar and the alleged sexual assault of a minor on a sleeper bus. Together, the Bench said, they "starkly underline a systemic failure" of law enforcement and civil administration to guarantee basic public safety. It ordered a vulnerability audit of public spaces and held that safety in public places is part of the right to live with dignity under Article 21.
When the matter returned on 5 October, the Bench gave the Delhi Police and the Union Home Ministry four weeks to respond. It said the priority is to prevent crime rather than act after it, and it asked why there was no dedicated "war room" to monitor and respond to incidents. These are allegations, and the trials are yet to come. But the pattern is familiar: a crime, an outcry, and then a debate about punishment. The Court is asking an earlier question, which is what stops the next one.
A statute book that is hardly lenient
Section 64 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS) prescribes a minimum of ten years' rigorous imprisonment for rape. In aggravated cases, such as rape by a police officer, public servant, guardian, teacher, or relative, it can extend to imprisonment for the rest of the offender's natural life. Section 65 prescribes at least twenty years where the victim is under sixteen, and life imprisonment or death where she is under twelve. Section 66 allows death where the victim dies or is left in a persistent vegetative state. The POCSO Act, 2012, is just as firm: Section 6 permits life imprisonment or death for aggravated penetrative sexual assault.
So the law is not lenient. The real question is whether that severity on paper changes anything in the real world.
Speed is part of the punishment
Deterrence comes less from the maximum sentence than from what a potential offender believes will happen to him, and how soon. A punishment that arrives in a year is a consequence. A punishment that arrives in fifteen years, or never, is a rumour. By then, the witnesses have tired or turned hostile, the victim's family has been worn down, and the offender has had years on bail to rebuild his life.
Parliament has not been silent on this. The criminal procedure code, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), expects the investigation of rape to be completed within two months and the trial within two months of the chargesheet. POCSO requires a child's evidence to be recorded within thirty days and the trial to be completed, as far as possible, within a year. These timelines exist. In practice, they are routinely missed, and nobody answers for it. A deadline that carries no consequence is only a suggestion.
That is the point my 2011 case made for me. The accused did not have to win. He only had to wait. Delay worked as a defence, in the courtroom and in the department, and he is on bail today because the system could not move at the pace its own law demands.
I am not arguing for speed at the cost of fairness. A quick trial on a flawed investigation is a worse injustice. But promptness and fairness are not opposites. A prompt trial is also a fairer one, because evidence is fresher, memories are sharper, and the accused is not left in limbo for a decade either.
What the offender expects
Will he be identified? Will the evidence survive? Will the victim withstand the pressure? Will the trial happen soon, and will a conviction lead to punishment? If the honest answer is "slowly, and maybe never," a harsher sentence changes very little. We get a tougher statute, not a more credible system.
The Supreme Court has been careful on this. In Rajendra Pralhadrao Wasnik v. State of Maharashtra, it acknowledged that there is no conclusive evidence that the death penalty, by itself, deters crime. That should sharpen the debate, not end it. The useful question is which mix of detection, certainty, speed, and punishment actually deters.
The "rarest of rare" gap
None of this means capital punishment has no place. A reasonable case can be made that the most aggravated sexual offences should stay within the narrow category where death is available. But the Constitution does not let the State impose death simply because a crime has made the country angry. Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab made life imprisonment the rule and death the exception, reserved for the "rarest of rare" case and decided only after weighing the circumstances of both the crime and the offender.
The numbers suggest trial courts and appellate courts do not read that standard the same way. According to the Square Circle Clinic's Death Penalty in India: Annual Statistics 2025, 1,279 people were sentenced to death between 2016 and 2025. By the end of 2025, 574 were on death row, the highest year-end figure since 2016, and 364 who had been sentenced to death were acquitted on appeal over the decade. The Supreme Court confirmed no death sentence for the third year running in 2025 and acquitted ten death-row prisoners that year.
That is a calibration gap, and it hurts in two directions. The guilty wait years for finality. The innocent risk something worse, because an error could surface only after a sentence is carried out.
The Court has also insisted that sentencing in a capital case cannot be an afterthought. Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh requires real material about the accused, including psychological evaluation, social background, and prison conduct. The Square Circle Clinic found that Sessions Courts widely fail to comply, and Vasanta Sampat Dupare v. Union of India (2025 INSC 1043) stressed once more that every safeguard must be honoured when the State seeks the ultimate punishment. This is not softness towards offenders. An irreversible punishment needs a reliable process.
Imprisonment is not one thing
One of the main reasons to prefer imprisonment over death is the possibility of reform. The Model Prison Manual, 2016, and the Model Prisons and Correctional Services Act, 2023, both treat rehabilitation as a core aim. But a first-time offender, a habitual violent offender, an organised criminal, and a person convicted of savage sexual violence carry different risks and different chances of change, and our prisons often keep them in the same system. At worst, jail hardens identities and strengthens criminal networks.
A serious correctional system would classify prisoners by risk and need. Reformable, lower-risk offenders should get education, training, and counselling. Those with significant behavioural or psychological risks need intensive intervention under closer supervision. Habitual or persistently violent offenders must be incapacitated, because public safety cannot rest on the hope that everyone will change. And the law should keep its severest sentence for the exceptional case that survives the highest scrutiny. The Supreme Court is already nudging prisons this way in Suhas Chakma v. Union of India, which examines open correctional institutions and overcrowding. Imprisonment should be a spectrum, not a choice between "jail" and "no jail".
Certainty over spectacle, and promptly
After every horrifying crime, someone demands immediate execution. But a quick punishment resting on a botched investigation does not strengthen the rule of law. It destroys it. What we need is faster justice with stronger safeguards. The presumption of innocence, the burden of proof, and the right to a fair trial stay. But once guilt is proved beyond reasonable doubt, delay should not push punishment so far away that it loses its deterrent force and its moral meaning.
India does not need another jump in the maximum sentence for rape. It needs the machinery that makes existing sentences believable, and makes them arrive on time:
- Forensic evidence preserved at once, and investigations completed within the statutory period, with a named officer answerable for any breach;
- Specialised investigators and prosecutors for sexual offences;
- Charge-sheets and trials held to their statutory timelines, with adjournments granted only for recorded, genuine reasons;
- Forensic laboratories working to measurable timelines;
- Real witness protection, and protection of victims from intimidation;
- Departmental proceedings, in cases involving personnel of the forces and public servants, run in parallel, and completed within a fixed period instead of waiting on the criminal trial or stalling it;
- A genuine sentencing hearing in every capital case; and
- Classification of prisoners by risk, with real rehabilitation for those who can be rehabilitated.
What should frighten an offender
Perhaps what should frighten someone contemplating rape is not the gallows alone. It is the knowledge that he will be identified, the evidence will hold, the investigation will not collapse, the victim will be protected, the trial will actually happen, and proven guilt will be followed by punishment soon enough to matter. India has shown it can write severe laws. It has not yet built a system that delivers on them reliably and on time.
So perhaps we do not have only a punishment problem. We have a calibration problem. The law must be severe enough to protect society, the process rigorous enough to protect the innocent, the punishment prompt enough to deter the guilty, and prison smart enough to tell the person who can be reformed from the one who must be kept away.
I still think about that officer's daughter, who was a child when it began. The question is not only whether the punishment is harsh enough. It is whether the whole system, from detection to conviction and from sentencing to imprisonment, is credible and quick enough to change behaviour before the next victim is created.
The purpose of criminal justice is not only to punish yesterday's offender. It is to prevent tomorrow's victim.
(The author is an advocate)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
