On 20 January 2025, two Indian courtrooms, separated by 2,500 kilometres, delivered two widely diverging verdicts. Both the judgments—the life sentence awarded to Sanjay Roy for the brutal rape and murder of a junior doctor at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, and the death penalty for SS Greeshma in the Sharon Raj murder case—“feel” wildly dissatisfying.
Last August, India woke up to news that made us question everything we thought we knew about workplace safety. The details that emerged from the rape and murder of the young woman doctor in Kolkata, serving a 36-hour night shift without proper facilities, managed to shock even a nation where sexual violence is far too common. The accused, Sanjay Roy, wasn’t an outsider who had breached hospital security. He was a civic volunteer, with unfettered access to the hospital. The vandalism, the nationwide protests, and the political and legislative wrangling that followed the case, however, did not affect Roy’s sentencing.
Meanwhile, in the Neyyattinkara Additional Sessions Court in Kerala, 24-year-old Greeshma was sentenced to death for poisoning her boyfriend, Sharon Raj, with an Ayurvedic concoction laced with herbicide in 2022. “The act of inviting Sharon over under the pretext of sexual intimacy and subsequently committing the crime cannot be ignored,” observed the court. The 586-page judgement is replete with several irrelevant references to Greeshma’s sexual behaviour. According to Justice AM Basheer, who pronounced the judgment, the case “gave a message that a lover cannot be trusted… Nowadays, the youths are following live-in relationships. If it is viewed lightly, it is as good as use and throw and one can easily target his partner. It will send wrong message to society.”
Parallel narratives
The aftermath of these verdicts tells us a little bit about justice in India, but it tells us a lot more about ourselves. In West Bengal, protests have continued over Roy’s “mild” sentence; even Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee expressed shock and demanded the death penalty. In Kerala, however, we witnessed a grotesque celebration of Greeshma’s death sentence. The All Kerala Men’s Association, a men’s rights group proudly opposed to “lesbian feminism”, attempted to pour milk over a cardboard cutout of Justice Basheer. They hailed the verdict as a victory against “women’s misuse of law” and asked, with breathtaking obliviousness, “Why don’t we, men, commit crimes? That is because we will have to spend the rest of our time in jail.”
These parallel narratives—one of institutional violence, another of intimate violence—force us to confront uncomfortable questions. How do we measure justice? Why does one judge’s restraint in the face of public bloodlust feel inadequate, while another’s embrace of the ultimate penalty feels like dangerous political theatre?
I want to be absolutely clear: Greeshma’s actions were calculated and cruel. She researched poison, made a failed prior attempt at murdering Raj, and eventually administered him the herbicide paraquat that prolonged his suffering. Sharon Raj’s death deserves severe punishment. But the path to that punishment, and the court’s reasoning in reaching its conclusion, reveals deeply troubling patterns in how our justice system operates.
To understand why these verdicts feel so jarring, we must examine how India’s courts actually approach capital punishment, beyond the simplified narratives that dominate public discourse. Despite its frequent invocation in media debates and political rhetoric, the death penalty was designed as an exception, not a rule.
The “rarest of rare” doctrine is frequently bandied about and misused. Anup Surendranath, a professor of law and the Executive Director of Project 39A, a criminal justice programme at the National Law University, Delhi, said that the phrase itself seems to convey that it’s simple, when in reality, it’s far more nuanced.
“One of the long-standing critiques of India’s use of the death penalty is that there has never been any consistent meaning or application of which convicted persons should be sentenced to death and which should not be,” he told me.
It isn’t merely about the brutality of a crime. The Supreme Court established clear steps: first, examining both the crime and the criminal; then weighing aggravating and mitigating factors; and finally, considering the accused’s potential for rehabilitation. According to Project 39A’s research over a 20-year period, Indian trial courts pronounce an average 140-150 death sentences each year. However, in 95 per cent of those cases, death sentences don’t survive appeal—either through acquittals or commutations.
This isn’t a coincidence—it’s evidence of the kind of trigger-happy instant-justice that we expect. “We live in a society that celebrates encounter killings and judges who give death sentences in five-seven days,” Surendranath said.
“There’s also the reality that judges in lower courts are operating under tremendous pressure.” That results in what Surendranath labelled “judicial indiscipline” in the Greeshma case. Where is the evaluation of mitigating factors? Where is the assessment of her potential for reformation? Instead, we get sermons about live-in relationships and dire warnings about youth morality.
The RG Kar verdict, on the other hand, while legally sound in its application of these principles, illuminates a devastating reality: Violence against women is so endemic that even its most brutal forms no longer register as extraordinary. The issue isn’t whether women should face consequences for their crimes—they absolutely must. The more troubling question to ask is why our justice system reserves its strident moral condemnation for women who show the slightest bit of sexual agency, while violence against women, even in its most horrific forms, is processed as an unfortunate but expected occurrence.
Also read: RG Kar case falls in ‘rarest of rare’ doctrine. Sanjay Roy deserves death penalty
Societal helplessness
When judges spend more time pondering a female perpetrator’s sexual history than considering whether hospital corridors can ever be safe for women again, we must acknowledge that our metrics for measuring horror are fundamentally skewed.
“There is a need to ‘other’ convicts in cases like these,” Surendranath observed, pointing to a deeper societal helplessness that emerges after every high-profile attack on women. We’ve seen this pattern play out so often—the protests, the demands for the death penalty, the promises of reform. Because it’s easier to call for blood than to examine why, more than a decade after the Delhi gang rape, we’re still fighting the same battles.
Both the RG Kar and Sharon Raj verdicts reveal a need for neat narratives, for monsters we can identify and eliminate by sending our problems to the gallows. But violence rarely announces itself with such clarity. When we reduce justice to a spectacle—whether through public bloodlust or performative celebration—we dodge the harder questions about why women’s bodies remain battlegrounds… and why their choices invite harsher judgment than their violation.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)