From Constitutional Promise to Unequal Redress: Inequality in Constitutional Court Compensation for Police Custodial Deaths in India

Abstract

In the absence of a legislative framework, the constitutional courts in India have improvised to award monetary compensation to victims who died due to police violence. The present study attempts to demonstrate that a systematic inequality persists in such compensation awards despite the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The study attempts to quantify inequality through a two-stage descriptive statistical analysis of 85 police custodial death cases decided between 1985 and 2025 by the constitutional courts. Stage I demonstrates unequal distribution of compensation through dual metric, i.e. ‘Compensation Fold Differences’ (CFD) and an ‘Inequality Intensity Scale’ (IIS). The year-wise CFD results are segregated into No, Low, Moderate, High, and Extreme Inequality to illustrate the magnitude of inequality. For Stage II analysis, various judicial approaches adopted to determine compensation are categorised into Other Methodologies and Mixed Methodologies (OM&MM) and Judicial Self-Assessment (JSA). Evidently, JSA is adopted in 74.12% of the sample cases. Thus, Stage II is designed to ascertain whether it is also yielding higher compensation for victims. The study concludes by demonstrating that the discretionary determination of compensation without adopting computation-based methods operates as an instrument of systemic disparity, and shows that the present constitutional court’s approach perpetuates inequal distribution of wealth towards similarly situated deceased victims. The findings identify that urgent legislative standardisation and computation-based compensatory mechanism is essential to ensure equitable redress for police custodial death victims, bridging the gap between constitutional mandate and judicial practice.