Convict Appeals 20-Year Sentence, Leaves Supreme Court with Life Imprisonment| SC Corrects High Court’s POCSO Error, Restores Life Term

Citation: Balesh Kumar Kuraiti v. State of Chhattisgarh, 2026 INSC 850 (Supreme Court of India, decided August 12, 2026).

Note: This case involves the sexual assault of a young child. This summary focuses on the legal principle the Supreme Court decided, without detailing the facts of the crime.

A man convicted under the POCSO Act and the IPC for a serious crime against a young child had his sentence reduced by the High Court — from life imprisonment down to 20 years. He then approached the Supreme Court, seemingly hoping for further relief. Instead, the Supreme Court restored his sentence all the way back to life imprisonment.

A trial court in Chhattisgarh convicted the man in 2017 and sentenced him to life imprisonment under both Section 376(2)(i) of the IPC and Section 6 of the POCSO Act, given the extreme severity of the offence. On appeal, the High Court upheld the conviction in 2024 but reduced the sentence to a fixed 20 years — relying on a 2019 amendment to the POCSO Act that had raised the minimum punishment for this offence from 10 to 20 years. The man then approached the Supreme Court, specifically challenging this sentencing question.

The Supreme Court made clear it wasn’t reconsidering his guilt at all — that finding stood untouched. The only question was whether the 20-year sentence was legally sound. And here’s the problem: the crime happened in 2016, three years before the 2019 amendment came into force. Under Article 20(1) of the Constitution — a fundamental protection against retrospective criminal punishment — a person can only be sentenced under the law as it existed at the time the offence was committed, not a harsher (or in this case, differently structured) version enacted later. Applying the amended law here was simply not legally permissible, no matter which direction it pushed the sentence.
The Court also pointed out that the High Court had given no real reasoning for settling on 20 years, especially given how young the victim was and how serious the trial court had found the offence to be.

Since the amended law couldn’t be used, the original, pre-amendment version of the POCSO Act applied — under which the trial court’s initial sentence of life imprisonment was legally correct all along. The Supreme Court set aside the High Court’s reduced sentence and restored the trial court’s original sentence of life imprisonment on both counts.

There’s a sharp irony here: the appellant went to the Supreme Court trying to settle a sentencing dispute in his favour, and instead ended up with a harsher outcome than what the High Court had given him. It’s also a clear, textbook illustration of a foundational constitutional safeguard — courts cannot pick and choose between old and new versions of a law depending on which happens to apply at a given moment; the law in force on the date of the offence governs, full stop. The Court closed by stressing the need for the justice system to protect child victims and treat crimes against them with the seriousness they demand.