Inside the Phansi Yard

Death row intensifies the structured brutalities of the penal system and reminds us why the struggle against the death penalty must also include the fact of prison violence

- Sharmila Purkayastha

ON September 30, 2015, a Mumbai city court sentenced five men to death and seven to life imprisonment for their role in the suburban train blasts of July 2006. Given the political nature of the case, the judgement had an immediate impact on the lives of the 12 men.

Designated as convicts, all were transferred from the Mumbai Central Jail at Arthur Road to different prisons in Maharashtra. Three were lodged in the Phansi Yard of the Nagpur Central Jail and two in the Phansi Yard at Pune's Yerawada Central Jail. In April 2021, one of them, Kamal Ahmed Ansari, died in a city hospital in Nagpur because of COVID. Invisible and forgotten by the outside world, the fate of all 12 men, including the deceased Ansari, was finally decided in July 2025 when a divisional bench of the Bombay High Court pronounced them as 'not guilty'.

The impact of the judgement is far-reaching as it raises fundamental questions about police investigations, custodial torture, malicious prosecutions and the compromised nature of terror trials. But what remains outside the purview of the judgement is the decade-long imprisonment that the 12 men endured. Within this, the death row punishment that five suffered amid the horrors of the punishment site merits discussion because the procedural confirmation of their death sentence did not happen for 10 years and yet they were kept in solitary cells in Phansi Yards.