Complete justice?

On 8 June, the Supreme Court of India set aside the POCSO conviction of Tamil Nadu resident Maruthupandi. He had been found guilty under Section 5(1) read with Section 6 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, which covers aggravated penetrative sexual assault and is among the most serious provisions in the statute. The Court invoked Article 142. It cited “complete justice.” It cited the victim’s subsequent marriage to the convicted man. It cited a payment of Rs 10 lakh.

It then set him free. This order deserves scrutiny, not because the Court’s compassion is incomprehensible, but because compassion exercised without safeguards is indistinguishable from impunity. Supporters of the order will argue that this was a consensual adolescent relationship rather than predatory abuse, and that the original complaint was filed because the accused refused to marry the victim, not because she experienced the relationship as a crime. That argument is not without a factual basis, but it is also legally irrelevant. POCSO is a strict liability statute.

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Parliament deliberately chose not to distinguish between predatory abuse and adolescent romance, not out of legislative naivety but as a considered policy judgment that social pressure, family coercion, and power imbalance can make claims of consent unreliable in such relationships. The Act does not ask whether the relationship was loving. It asks whether one party was a minor. The answer here was yes. The Court itself did not dispute the facts of the offence. It explicitly stated it was not entering into the merits. A court that declines to examine the merits cannot simultaneously validate a characterisation of the relationship as consensual.

The question of whether it was romantic or predatory is one the Court chose not to answer, and then acted as if it had. The Court considered several elements: the subsequent marriage, the victim’s affidavit, the long passage of time, the state government’s position of no objection, and a payment of Rs 10 lakh described as being “towards securing her future and family life.” These together formed the basis for the exercise of Article 142. The payment was one factor among many. That is what the order says. Yet the question still demands to be asked: what role did money play in securing the victim’s cooperation?

The offence was established through the criminal process and culminated in a conviction that survived appellate scrutiny. By February 2025, after a failed marriage with another man, the victim had married the accused and was willing to close the case. Between that confirmed conviction and this closure lies a Rs 10 lakh payment, recorded approvingly by the Court. Nowhere in the order did the Court examine whether the victim’s change of position was freely arrived at or financially induced.

The payment becoming part of the package of considerations that resulted in the conviction being set aside raises serious questions about whether India’s most serious child protection statute can be navigated out of with the right combination of marriage and money. That is a question the Court did not ask. It should have. Once the conviction is set aside, what protects this woman if the marriage fails? She has Rs 10 lakh, already received. She has whatever ordinary remedies family law provides: maintenance proceedings, divorce court, years of litigation.

What she does not have is any enforceable court-imposed safeguard. Instructively, the Supreme Court in K. Kirubakaran v. State of Tamil Nadu, decided in October 2025, was more cautious. That case also involved a Section 6 POCSO conviction set aside under Article 142 after the accused married the victim; but there, the bench inserted an explicit warning: that if the husband defaulted in future and it was brought to the Court’s notice, “the consequences may not be too palatable for the appellant.”

The Kirubakaran bench had also directed the Tamil Nadu State Legal Services Authority to independently verify the wife’s well-being before passing the final order. The June 8 order contains no such warning. No independent verification was required. No conditional language appears. It grants unconditional finality. The man walks free without a single enforceable obligation to the woman whose case resulted in the conviction. The Court could have explored enforceable safeguards to protect the complainant’s future interests.

It chose not to, and that omission is not a minor oversight but the structural weakness at the heart of this order. Article 142 exists to do complete justice in exceptional cases. No one disputes that. What must be examined is how far that power extends. POCSO’s strict liability framework is not an accident of drafting. It is a deliberate Parliamentary policy choice, enacted after careful deliberation, reflecting India’s obligations under international child protection norms.

When the Supreme Court uses Article 142 to soften that framework, not once but in a discernible pattern, it is not merely resolving an individual dispute but making a policy correction that Parliament has not made. In fact, the Supreme Court is separately examining in another pending matter whether the age of consent under POCSO should be reduced to 16 years to exclude consensual adolescent relationships from criminal liability. That is the constitutionally appropriate route: a legislative amendment, or at minimum a judicial reference that Parliament can respond to.

What is happening instead is case-by-case relief through Article 142, each order accompanied by a “not a precedent” disclaimer whose practical effect is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the emerging pattern of decisions. Article 142 was never designed to become a mechanism for routinely softening statutory mandates that Parliament deliberately enacted. The June 8 order reflects an expansive use of that power that pushes against the policy choices embodied in POCSO. If the Court can set aside a Section 6 conviction because subsequent events make punishment appear inconvenient, the question that must be answered is: where do the limits of Article 142 lie? The Court has not answered that question.

It has only deferred it to the next case. Both are Supreme Court orders from Tamil Nadu. Both involve Section 6 POCSO convictions for aggravated penetrative sexual assault, carrying a minimum sentence of ten years. Both were set aside under Article 142 after the accused married the victim. Both are accompanied by “not a precedent” disclaimers. Lawyers in every district court in India are reading this pattern. The message being received is clear: let time pass, marry the victim, arrange a settlement, and there is a door open at the top. The disclaimer is noted.

The pattern is what matters. None of this means that the broader concern animating these orders is illegitimate. There is growing unease across the legal system about the criminalisation of adolescent relationships under POCSO, and that unease has a basis. It must be said plainly, however, that acknowledging this concern at the level of legislative policy is an entirely different matter from accepting the consensual characterisation in any individual case. As this article has argued, the Court in the June 8 order did not examine whether this particular relationship was consensual; it simply proceeded as though it were.

That is the error. The legislative question is separate and must be kept separate. Many jurisdictions have addressed the broader problem through what are commonly called “Romeo and Juliet” provisions, which create limited exceptions for consensual relationships between adolescents close in age while preserving severe penalties for exploitative conduct by adults. Whether India should adopt a similar framework is a question that deserves open parliamentary debate, structured testimony, and a considered legislative mandate, not resolution by judicial improvisation in individual cases.

Such choices involve balancing child protection, adolescent autonomy, social realities, and criminal justice policy, and they belong to the legislative domain, not to ad hoc exercises of Article 142. Every time the Court steps in, Parliament is let off the hook. The pressure to reform a law that demonstrably needs refinement dissipates with each Article 142 order, and that is not a side effect but a structural consequence of judicial improvisation substituting for legislative will. The debate about whether POCSO’s strict liability framework requires amendment to address adolescent relationships is legitimate and necessary.

It should happen in Parliament, in open proceedings, with structured testimony and public scrutiny. The Supreme Court is not the right institution for that debate and Article 142 is not the right instrument. The June 8 order is not simply compassionate. It reflects an expansive use of Article 142 that pushes against the policy choices Parliament embedded in POCSO, leaves the victim without enforceable protections, and signals to every future accused that a conviction under the Act is a negotiating position rather than a final judgment. The Court called it complete justice. For Maruthupandi, it is. For the statute Parliament enacted to protect children, and for the next minor whose case may never reach a courtroom because the exit route is now visible, it is something else entirely: erosion, one exceptional case at a time.

(THE WRITER IS AN AUTHOR, LEGAL COMMENTATOR AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF INDIACOMMENTARY.COM)