Three days in August produced an acquittal in one high-profile case and a conviction on appeal in another. Together they explain something most people misunderstand about how criminal verdicts work.
On 3 August, a Delhi court acquitted former Wrestling Federation of India chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh in the sexual harassment case brought by six women wrestlers. On 6 August, the Bombay High Court overturned Tarun Tejpal's 2021 acquittal and convicted him, thirteen years after the underlying incident. Two verdicts, seventy-two hours apart, moving in opposite directions. For anyone who has ever faced an accusation, or made one, the pair is worth understanding properly, because public conversation gets the meaning of both wrong.
The Standard Is the Point
Criminal courts convict only when guilt is proved beyond reasonable doubt. That standard is deliberately, structurally high, because the criminal law's consequences, imprisonment, permanent stigma, are the harshest the state can impose. The Delhi court's finding was that the prosecution had not carried that burden. That is what an acquittal is: a finding about the state of the evidence measured against the standard, not a certificate of innocence and not a finding that the complainants lied. Both of those readings, and public commentary produced plenty of each, claim more than the verdict says. The presumption of innocence means an acquitted person is entitled to be treated as not guilty. It does not convert the verdict into a judicial declaration about what happened.
Acquittal Is Not Always the End
The Tejpal reversal illustrates the other half of the picture. In India, unlike some jurisdictions, the prosecution can appeal an acquittal, and appellate courts can and do convert acquittals into convictions where they find the trial court misread the evidence. There is no double jeopardy bar against it; the constitutional protection under Article 20(2) prevents a second prosecution after conviction or acquittal for the same offence, not appellate review of the first proceeding. The 2021 acquittal, widely criticised at the time for its observations about the complainant, was tested for five years on appeal and did not survive contact with the electronic record, including apology emails the accused had himself written at the time and CCTV footage establishing the timeline. A first verdict, in either direction, is a stage, not a destination. In the wrestlers' case too, an appeal against the acquittal remains legally open to the prosecution.
What This Means If You Are Accused
Three practical truths follow. First, the process is long, and its length is itself a penalty nobody sentences you to; the Tejpal matter ran thirteen years across trial and appeal. Anyone entering a serious criminal proceeding, on either side, should plan for years, not months, financially, professionally, and personally. Second, contemporaneous records decide cases. What convicted Tejpal on appeal was not rhetoric but his own emails and the building's cameras. The same digital permanence this magazine has written about all year cuts in every direction: it can exonerate as easily as it can convict, and it does not care which side produced it. Third, an acquittal will not, by itself, restore a reputation. Public opinion runs on a different standard of proof and a different clock. Managing the aftermath of even a successful defence, professionally and socially, is work the verdict does not do for you.
And What It Means If You Are Watching
For everyone else, the honest posture after a high-profile verdict is more restraint than the internet rewards. An acquittal does not license calling the complainants liars; a conviction does not retroactively validate every claim made in commentary along the way. Courts decide specific charges on specific evidence against a specific standard. August's two verdicts, read together, are not a contradiction. They are the system doing the two different things it is built to do: refusing to convict where proof falls short, and correcting a verdict where the evidence was misread. Both protections exist for the same reason, and anyone could one day need either.