In Brief
Two police officers (Sub-Inspector Bhagwan Dass and Assistant Sub-Inspector Magan Singh) were acquitted by a trial court of charges relating to illegal detention and custodial torture of a man in 1992. The High Court reversed the acquittal and convicted them. The Supreme Court acknowledged the convictions but reduced the sentence from two years to time already served (fifteen months), citing the extreme age of the appellants (80 and 70+ years), their superannuation, the old occurrence from 1992, and the victim's subsequent government employment. The Court clarified this lenient approach applied only to these peculiar circumstances and was not a precedent."
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