Acquitted Thirteen Times, Acknowledged Never: What Does the State Owe the Wrongly Convicted?

Acquittal Ends the Punishment, Not the Harm

Imagine you are the officer in a State home department. On your desk is a file proposing that the government formally acknowledge that Surinder Koli was wrongly imprisoned. It also proposes that the State offer him and people like him compensation, housing and psychosocial support. What the file shows.

• Koli was arrested in 2006 in the Nithari cases.
• He spent close to 20 years in prison, much of it on death row.
• He was acquitted 13 times, finally by the Supreme Court in November 2025.
• During those years, sections of the media turned him into a figure of horror and that image outlived every acquittal. He died in September 2026, less than a year after walking free. The file arrives too late for him, but not for the next person.

Why signing is harder than it looks The easy answer would be to sign at once. But a careful officer hesitates and not out of callousness.

• It admits error. A formal acknowledgement concedes that investigators, prosecutors and courts got it wrong over two decades. Institutions fear that such admissions invite lawsuits, damage morale and weaken public faith in the justice system.
• It carries a cost. Compensation and rehabilitation create a liability and a precedent for many others released after long trials.
• The public may not follow. Much of the public may still believe the man was guilty, whatever the courts decided. The cost of not signing is just as concrete. Koli's experience is the evidence. A person released after two decades must relearn a changed world, find livelihood and housing, reconnect with family and live under a label no acquittal erased. The writers of the article, from The Square Circle Clinic at NALSAR University of Law, describe a system that brought its full force against him and then offered nothing when it was proven wrong.

The decision Sign the file. Acknowledge the wrong and build a standing mechanism of support.

The ethical reason is simple:

• The State, not the individual, exercised the coercive power that took those years.
• When that power is exercised wrongly, the duty to repair belongs to the one who caused the harm. Article 21's promise of life with dignity does not end at the prison gate. The cost of this choice. The government will spend money it could use elsewhere and admit failures it would rather not name. Some citizens will protest. That cost is real, but it is the price of a justice system that claims integrity. The unfinished law. The Law Commission's 277th Report recommended a statutory framework for compensating victims of wrongful prosecution. It has not been comprehensively enacted and until it is, each case depends on chance.