S urinder Koli was acquitted and released from prison in November 2025 by the Supreme Court after spending close to 20 years in prison, many of which were on death row. On September 18, he was found dead. early news reports described it as a suicide Although an autopsy is awaited.
The eagerness driving our collective retributive instinct appears missing when we are faced with the consequences of that bloodlust. The response to such injustice cannot be ad hoc sympathy but must be structural and underpinned by principles of integrity, accountability and remediation. The integrity of a justice system lies in a meaningful acknowledgement of wrongdoing when the wrong occurs. Psychosocial support to cope with the realities of their new world healthily; safe halfway homes which allow the person to slowly adjust to a constantly changing world; reconnection with the family that they left behind; and monetary support and employment schemes to allow them a chance at independent livelihood must be seen as an inalienable part of a harsh criminal justice system, and at minimum when it exercises its coercive powers wrongfully.
For a person like Koli, whose name still conjured a particular and monstrous image, rebuilding his life posed additional challenges. Even after being acquitted, he was condemned by the same society he had to re-enter. The seriously botched investigation, however, has little bearing on public memory.
Because of the stigma associated with his name and his fear of the public’s reaction, this may have been.
Koli had adopted a different name to secure housing and employment, according to news reports.
Prisoners, particularly those like Koli, who are released after spending decades incarcerated, have to readjust to a world vastly different from the one they entered when they went to prison. Between 2009 and 2022, Koli was found guilty and sentenced to death by the trial court in 13 cases. When acquitting him in 2025 in the last case, the Supreme Court made it clear that the High Court’s comments could not be dismissed as a ‘rhetorical excess’ and that the evidentiary basis for Koli’s conviction was unreliable, inadmissible and in violation of his rights. Yet, Koli came close to being executed in 2014. An analysis by The Square Circle Clinic of 25 years of data on death sentences shows that 40% of death sentences imposed by trial courts ultimately result in acquittals by appellate courts. It has awarded compensation in a few cases and, in 2025, recognised the need for a legislative response to wrongful convictions.
One by one, the cases against him unravelled, as court after court found that there was no real evidence against him. In several cases, the Allahabad High Court characterised the investigation as botched up and an “easy course of implicating a poor servant of the house by demonising him, without taking due care of probing more serious aspects. A stay on execution, issued by the Supreme Court just four hours before, averted that fate. Koli’s case is not a one-off. India has a serious wrongful convictions problem. That is a staggering number, made worse by the fact that individuals are made to live under a death sentence even when their convictions are barely sustainable. Once set at liberty, neither the State nor society provides them with adequate support to return and reintegrate, even as we may have subjected them to the full force of our vengeance. There have been a few instances where the Supreme Court has explicitly recognised such travesties. But this barely skims the surface of a deep structural problem. As institutions, our prisons are far from being effective in preparing individuals for reintegration into society. Asking a prison to be interested in a category of prisoners the justice system has declared to be executed is being naive about the political and structural reality of our prisons. These failures, which begin inside prisons, are only compounded outside. This readjustment involves unlearning, relearning, and learning new things that a person, now much older and unaccustomed to such a stimulating environment, has to undergo. Life has to begin anew with livelihood and housing to be found, and relationships to be re-established. The immense cognitive, emotional, psychological, and physical reorientation required is difficult to imagine.
