Rescuing Justice from the Law: How the Court Heard What the Law Could Not Say

The Supreme Court of India, in a recent and rare exercise of constitutional power, employed Article 142 of the Indian Constitution – which empowers the Court to pass any decree or order necessary for doing complete justice in any cause or matter before it – to uphold a conviction under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO) in In Re: Right to Privacy of Adolescents, while deciding against imposing a sentence on the convicted accused. The Court’s reasoning centered around the acknowledgment that the minor victim, now an adult, regards the accused as her husband and as the father of their child. The judgment is reflective of the growing tension between the rigidity of child protection laws and the constitutional imperative of a justice that is responsive to lived realities. 

This article unfolds through three prongs. First, it takes up the task of analyzing the judgment itself and the reasoning through which the Court negotiated the tension between statutory mandates and an equitable outcome. Second, it dives into a constitutional enquiry, situating Article 142 not as an exception but as a proper structural mechanism that enables a more dignitarian and agency-sensitive reading of any provision. Third, it ventures into a philosophical enquiry that draws upon thinkers in the likes of Agamben and Nussbaum to examine how the law constructs vulnerability, childhood, and a moral authority. 

Together, this article argues that the judgment is not an isolated act of discretion as it reads on the face of it but stands as a moment marking jurisprudential radicalism – a step towards what may be called “constitutional compassion” in Indian criminal jurisprudence.

The Statutory Straitjacket: POCSO and the Legal Fiction of Consent

The POCSO Act was legislated with one equivocal goal – to provide a robust structure of law within which children can be protected from sexual abuse. To that end, the law rests on a strict liability framework. All sexual acts involving persons under the age of 18 are automatically criminalised regardless of any context behind the act, such as consent or relational dynamics. Sections 3 to 6 of the Act, particularly Section 6, which deals with aggravated penetrative sexual assault, impose minimum mandatory sentences without exceptions. This architecture leaves little room for a nuanced appraisal of adolescent autonomy or the differentiated nature of relationships that emerge at that age. 

However, an acute paradox is reflected by the rigidity of this structure – in seeking to protect minors, POCSO can end up punishing those very individuals it aims to shield. The 2025 judgment directly confronts this contradiction. While the Court unequivocally reaffirmed that consent is not a defence under POCSO, it went on to refrain from imposing the statutorily mandated 20 year sentence on the accused, all the while upholding his conviction. This was a rare exercise of constitutional discretion under Article 142, one which cannot be treated as a retreat from law, but as a profound engagement with specifics that the law often refuses to acknowledge in carrying out its function. 

The facts of the case laid bare the inadequacies of a one-size-fits-all approach. A 14 year old girl who was abandoned by her family and protective state institutions alike, entered into what she consistently described as a consensual relationship with a man she proceeded to marry and have a child with. The prosecution’s claims under POCSO flattened this context heavily into a binary of “victim” and “perpetrator”. The High Court of Calcutta, in an ill-considered effort to recognize this complexity and at the risk of setting a dangerous precedent, set aside the conviction under its inherent powers. But it did so by invoking moralistic stereotypes about adolescent sexuality – observing, for instance, that young girls must “control their sexual urges” and that they “lose their dignity” by yielding to “fleeting pleasure”. The same bench that delivered the 2025 judgment in the Supreme Court, in 2024, deemed statements stemming from such a reasoning as highly objectionable and legally unsound.

In the present case, the Court also made an important differentiation in distinguishing between the legal incapacity to consent and the moral weight of actual consent. While the statute denies legal recognition of an adolescent’s agency, the Court acknowledged that the absence of an informed choice in the victim’s earlier years cannot solely be attributed to her age, but also to systemic failures including the inadequacy of state provided shelters and the ordeal of a criminal process that compounded her trauma further by overriding her clearly expressed will. Rather than treating these failures as background noise, the Court brought them to the forefront. It recognized that the harm suffered by the victim not only stemmed from the offense so committed, but from the rigid application of the law itself. 

The Expert Committee report (constituted by an order of the Court in the 2024 judgment) composed of a clinical psychologist, a social scientist, and a juvenile justice expert, formed the evidentiary backbone of the Court’s reasoning. Its findings revealed that the victim’s trauma had emerged less from the sexual act itself and more from the systemic failures of police, medical, and judicial processes. The report documented her current efforts to achieve stability as a single mother and recommended continued educational and financial support and played a critical role in the Court’s reasoning. This marks a shift from the idea of sentencing governed by a logic of retribution to a logic of justice. Essentially, the fiction of consent created by the POCSO Act is challenged not by annulling the law and neither is its nature of strict liability in question – it is being challenged by the act of resisting its automatic penal consequences when such enforcement would further entrench harm. In carrying this out, the Court also provides an implicit repudiation of the High Court’s regression to a more “duty-based” morality, one where adolescent girls are expected to suppress their sexualities in order to maintain respectability in the society. 

Furthermore, this case is not an isolated instance. The Madras High Court in the case, Vijayalakshmi v. State Rep. (2021), similarly called for a reconsideration of the blanket criminalization method adopted by the POCSO framework. The present case nevertheless goes further – it not only reaffirms the protective imperative that the law is tasked with, but also adds a restorative dimension by directly confronting the emotional and socio-economic fallout of the process itself. 

To meaningfully develop the second prong of my argument, the focus of the article must be shifted away from “why the court did it” to “how the court did it” and how this fits into the constitutional structure. The goal is to show that Article 142 is not a disruptive anomaly but a structural mechanism of justice which can be particularly suited to redressing statutory mandates to realise human dignity and justice where it would otherwise be counterproductive. 

Article 142 as a Safety Valve: Beyond Exceptionalism

This Article is traditionally seen as a residual or exceptional provision and is often invoked when the strict application of statutes risks leading to an unjust result. However, this framing – as a last resort corrective – still risks obscuring the deeper constitutional logic that lies behind the provision: The Court did not act despite the legal order; it only acted through it. The Supreme Court, via Article 142, is empowered to “pass such decree or make such order as is necessary for doing complete justice” in any cause or matter before it. The Article was recognized as a foundational one that accounts for the possibility that legal regimes, no matter how well intentioned they may be, can cause injustice when applied without sensitivity to lived experience. In the present case, the invocation of this Article by the Court is reflective of its allegiance to its function of being a guarantor of “complete justice” as envisioned in the provision. 

Though it is often easy to conflate the employment of this Article as synonymous with an evolving understanding of constitutional interpretation as an ethically charged task rather than a rule-based one, I would argue that it is no less normatively considerate than the alternative outcome involving sentencing of the convict. The route taken by the judges in this case is one that is reflective of a respect towards both the statute and the constitution and cannot be one to be labelled as judicial benevolence – that would render the entire exercise weak. 

This reading also echoes and is incorporative of Justice Krishna Iyer’s understandings of adjudication as tied up with sociological jurisprudence with a human purpose. This renders Article 142 not a deus ex machina but a constitutionally supported site where the normative core of justice can override procedural rigidity. The provision exists within the law, and not outside it. 

While the Court cautioned against using the Article to contravene express statues in Supreme Court Bar Association v. Union of India (1998), it also reaffirmed that it could be used to supplement law where outcomes may be unjust. The present judgment falls squarely within this requirement, as it neither invalidated the statute nor violated its core provisions – as evidenced by the conviction – but only resisted the automaticity of its penal consequences and with valid reason too. 

It is also better perceived as an assertion of a higher-order – one that prioritises constitutional fidelity over statutory rigidity by insisting that justice must adapt to context. In exercising Article 142, the Court did not abandon legality but reaffirmed it at its constitutional source, emphasising that the legitimacy of law depends upon its capacity to remain responsive to human circumstance. In that sense, the judgment embodies fidelity not to textualism, but to the Constitution’s transformative ideals of dignity, equality, and compassion.

The legitimacy of this practice finds support in a carefully developed line of precedents. In Union Carbide Corporation v. Union of India (1991), the same Court used Article 142 to approve a settlement in the Bhopal Gas Tragedy matter, sidestepping procedural complexities to ensure immediate relief to those victimized by it. Similarly, the Court in the case of State of Punjab v. Rafiq Masih (2014) carried out a similar exercise, reasoning that enforcing statutorily guaranteed recoveries would result in hardship, and that Article 142 could be exercised to avoid such unjust outcomes, particularly when individual vulnerability is exacerbated by state action.

The focus of the Court in all these cases, including in the present one, is placed on obtaining relief for the victim – rightfully emphasising on the victim centric nature of justice in India. Thus, in a statutory process devoid of judicial discretion, Article 142 emerges, not as a loophole, but as a constitutional mechanism of adjudication that conforms with the purpose of law. 

A Philosophical Enquiry: Beyond the Construct of a “Child”

At its most radical edge, the judgment expresses a fundamental provocation beyond its departure from strict formalism in asking: Who is the subject of Law? and When does the Law become unjust in its fidelity to form? 

Giorgio Agamben, in State of Exception, warns that the sovereign is defined not solely by the power to make laws, but by the power to decide when the law must be made dormant to preserve the essence of its morality and its spirit from the excesses of its letter. Article 142 in this context becomes the site of such a sovereign act – not as an authoritarian override but rather as a humane interruption. In choosing not to impose a sentence on the accused despite affirming the conviction, the Court effectively suspended the punitive arm of law and created a liminal space wherein the threshold between legality and ethics is marked. 

Foucault’s conception of governmentality also emerges as relevant to interpret the deeper stakes of the Court’s reasoning. The judgment resists the disciplinary function of law that seeks to normalize, regulate, and punish deviations from its constructed categories, particularly the category of a “child” as passive, voiceless, and perpetually vulnerable. The Court’s reasoning instead inclines towards a more responsive and biopolitical vision of justice – one that governs not by asserting power over life but by enabling life to thrive despite institutional abandonment. In this line of thought, this decision is embedded outside the protectionist statutes – it reframes the child not as a juridical object to be protected, but as an agent caught amid structural violence. 

Deeper into the enquiry, Nussbaum’s writings on the capabilities approach argues that justice must begin with the question: What is each person able to do and to be? In this sense, the judgment can be seen as a Nussbaumian exercise in constitutional compassion – the Court identifies justice not with a uniform sanction, but with the expansion of the victim’s concrete capacities for dignity, autonomy, and relational stability. By foregrounding lived capability over abstract legality, it performs a jurisprudence of enabling, rather than merely punishing.

Feminist scholars have long demonstrated that POCSO jurisprudence reproduces a paternalistic moral order in which the “child” is defined through adult fear rather than adolescent experience. As Atreyee Sengupta notes, the Act’s protective structure often collapses agency into victimhood, thereby erasing the adolescent’s voice. Against this backdrop, the Court’s judgment represents a rare inversion: it treats the young woman not as a passive beneficiary of protection but as a self‑determining agent. Read in this light, this move from protectionism to recognition marks a radical shift in the moral vocabulary of POCSO jurisprudence – from a discourse of control to one of compassion and dignity.

Reading the judgment in light of this opinion crystallizes the shift in moral vocabulary. In refusing to incarcerate the accused out of deference to the victim’s agency, this judgment reflects precisely this ethic. It honors the victim, not by erasing the harm deemed by the state, but by refusing to perpetuate further, actual harm caused through the machinery of the state. Thus, we witness a shift from legalism to jurisprudential humanism – a form of reasoning where dignity, development, and care are not about rhetorical ideas, but constitutional commitments that need to be carried out.

Conclusion

This ruling represents far more than an isolated act of discretion under Article 142. It is an event that confronts the fissures within statutory justice, recognizes the interplay between agency and vulnerability, and insists on reading the law not just in terms of the rules that embody it but also in aiming to realize its broader purpose – to carry out justice. It was a very carefully crafted exercise of negotiating between differing positions in law carried out by the Supreme Court which illuminates the insufficiencies of a one-size-fits-all framework. 

By locating Article 142 not as judicial indulgence but within the structural framework as a feature that aids in maintaining constitutional fidelity, the Court restores justice to its rightful place – not above the law but within its folds. In framing jurisprudence in lines that allow it to engage with moral philosophy, the judgment also exemplifies a move from legal closure to legal care, away from a prevalent institutional apathy. 

Finally, what emerges is not just a doctrinal balancing act, but a form of constitutional compassion – one that views law as a means to defend it in all its fragility and nuances.

It is, in every sense, an expression of what it means to do “complete justice”.