The year gone by saw some important developments in criminal law, and this points to direction in which criminal law is headed and how it is likely to be used. The developments reveal an intention to increase the arenas of public life within which criminal law can enter, the intensity of punitive punishment that can be administered, and a simultaneous undermining of constitutional safeguards for the accused and the rights of the defence.These developments are not representing incidents or expressions that emerged within criminal law but doctrinal movements. Neither the definition of ‘development’ nor the list presented here is exhaustive. But it points to patterns seen in 2025.1. Criminalisation and sexual violenceIn July, 2025, the Aparajita Woman and Child Bill (West Bengal Criminal Laws Amendment) was returned to the Bengal assembly after the governor – citing the Ministry of Home Affairs – expressed concern over mandatory death sentences, reduced judicial discretion and disproportionate penalties.In the same month, senior advocate Indira Jaisingh filed written submissions urging the Supreme Court to create a statutory exception for consensual sexual activity involving 16-18 year olds against the category of ‘statutory rape’ under POCSO. The arguments against blanket criminalisation cite the empirical evidence regarding active consensual sexual activity between adolescents, and the frequent invocation of POCSO in instances of consensual sexual activity between 16-18 year olds.Amidst criminal law discourse on sexual violence, a dominant bend is observed towards longer sentences, reduced judicial discretion and blanket criminalisations. This reveals an urge to measure justice as proportional to the ease with which punitive measures can be (symbolically or practically) invoked against the accused. 2. Questions of freedom, security and peaceMultiple statutes and amendments were introduced or approved in 2025, promising freedom, security and peace in the public sphere.The Uttarakhand cabinet approved the Uttarakhand Freedom of Religion (Amendment) Bill 2025. This bill aims to amend the 2018 statute, increasing the maximum punishment under the law from 10 years to life imprisonment. In December, the Bill was returned by the governor, citing concerns regarding the penalties for certain offences. Joining the list of states with punitive regulations of conversion practices, Rajasthan passed the Rajasthan Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Bill, 2025. It criminalises acts of conversion considered to be caused by fraudulent means including ‘misrepresentation.’ While Chhattisgarh vowed to strengthen their pre-existing legislations with harsher penalties, other states promised new ones. The constitutionality of many state anti-conversion laws also got challenged in the Supreme Court.The statutes increasingly blur the distinction between propagation of religion and ‘fraudulent’ and ‘forceful’ means of conversion, risking criminalisation of inter-faith marriages and educational and communal activities involving inter-faith interaction. They presume a blanket suspicion over conversion practices notwithstanding the complex web of motives and intent within which they have come to be situated in post-colonial India, eventually allowing unguided local-level executive discretion and interpretation.The collapsing of distinction between acts, penalties and motives can also be observed in The Assam Prohibition of Polygamy Bill, 2025. For instance, parents, legal guardians, village headmen and qazis becomes eligible for the penalty for ‘abetment’ if convicted of intentional participation in a polygamous marriage and also if they ‘neglect’ or unreasonably delay reporting on the same – both bearing the same punishment.The Karnataka Hate Speech and Hate Crimes (Prevention) Bill, 2025 criminalises acts of communication ‘intending’ to cause ‘injury, disharmony or feelings of enmity or hatred or ill-will’ with penalties extending up to seven years. The Bill awaiting governor’s assent even allows preventive action as per the judgement of the executive. While the Bill proposes harsh punitive action, it suffers from vague and ambiguous terminologies, risking the criminalisation of broad range of communicative acts.Claiming the ineffectiveness of other statutes in tackling ‘left-wing’ extremism, the Maharashtra Special Public Security Act, 2024 is currently awaiting presidential assent. The statute criminalises ‘unlawful’ activities, including membership, contribution and abetment to unlawful organisations. The contours of ‘membership’, ‘abetment’ and ‘unlawful’ are ambiguous and hence at the mercy of executive discretion.The Karnataka Social Boycott (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Bill, 2025, awaiting the governor’s assent, demonstrates irony, as it attempts to protect an individual from being boycotted by their own caste and religious community by imprisoning individuals who cause it. It is uncertain how the Bill proposes to attribute individual liability for a social act; who it proposes to criminalises after conceptualising the ‘accused’ as an individual whose acts of social boycott succeed the decision of the caste panchayat; and how it aims to distinguish between social boycott and acts of indifference or non-communication/non-relation.Legislative proposals for criminalisation are evading clear communication regarding the act they aim to criminalise, the ‘harm’ they identify and what they aim to free against. Broad and harsh criminal accusations are called upon as necessary for achieving vague governance goals such as freedom, security and public peace, with no specific frameworks of ascertaining legal culpability. This is increasingly allowing criminal law to evade the responsibility to justify its actions.This culture of disproportionate invocation of penal machinery can be seen trickling down to the everyday life. What binds the charges of Section 152 (acts endangering sovereignty or unity and integrity of India) against Ali Khan Mahmudabad over his digital comment on Operation Sindoor and police complaints registered against comedians for spreading obscenity is the conflation of individual moral discontent with public harm.This generalised tolerance for criminal law’s presence in the public sphere harshly impacts preventive detention and bail adjudication. The elongated pre-trial detention of people accused in the Elgar Parishad case of 2018 and the Delhi riots case of 2020 and the judicial discourse surrounding these cases exceptionalises bail by making the liberty of the individual and the constitutional safeguards that protect it, unfairly compete against a generalised, vague and broad threats to national and public security. Bail adjudication is adorning a punitive life of its own not governed by doctrinal logic. The scenario worsens as 97.2% of those detained under UAPA between 2015-2020 ended up getting acquitted after long periods of detention. The punitive paradigm can be observed governing the pre-trial stages outside the ‘special’ offences as well. Despite the Supreme Court’s order against arbitrary property demolitions, they are being executed as punishment for the ‘criminally accused,’ as was observed also, in the demolitions of properties associated with those accused in the communal clashes following ‘I love Mohammad’ demonstrations. Punitive action is leaving judicial hands and entering the fist of the executive, distributing punishment extra-judicially on recipients with no proven legal culpability.3. Of fairer trails and fairer punishmentsThe Supreme Court recently ordered that an arrest will be considered illegal if the grounds of arrest have not been communicated to the arrestee in written language that they understand. What marks or checks the legal legitimacy of this ‘written communication’ and protects against forgery and forced signatures remains unclear. Until procedural reforms accommodate for the vulnerability of an accused person vis-a-vis the police, the widespread criminalisation, increasing vacuum for executive discretion and undervaluation of constitutional safeguards, they will merely remain administrative formalities with no bearing on the rights of the accused.In service of fairer sentencing, the court in Vasant Dupare v. Union of India ruled that a failure to comply with death penalty sentencing procedures is a violation of fundamental rights that will result in setting aside of death sentences. Furthermore, in granting acquittal to the appellant in Kattavellai @ Devakar v. State of Tamil Nadu, the court took cognisance of the injustice caused by elongated incarceration that eventually ended in acquittals and called for legislative action on wrongful convictions. Following the same, three appellants acquitted from death row – Ramkirat Munilal Goud v. State of Maharashtra, Kattavellai @ Devakar v. State of Tamil Nadu, and Sanjay v. State of Uttar Pradesh – filed writ petitions demanding compensation from the state for wrongful conviction.Such decisions in favour of procedural fairness should be read alongside other details regarding death row.The Supreme Court acquitted death row convicts in nearly 53% of the death sentence confirmation cases it decided. In many such acquittals, the Supreme Court announces the accused to be victims of “tainted investigation,” “unfair prosecution,” “wrongful incarceration.” Decades spent on death row ultimately halt with the appellate courts’ condemnation. This immense discrepancy in guilt adjudication should trigger an urgency to acknowledge wrongful convictions and address the lacuna governing engagement with evidence, witnesses and doctrinal reasoning at the lower courts.The rates of commutations at the appellate level are also high. Though death sentences are not being confirmed, the nature of life sentences is undergoing a fundamental and punitive shift. The process of determining the duration and nature of life imprisonment sentences reflect negligible engagement with sentencing framework and unguided decision-making. The avoidance of the complexity of sentencing also clouded the court’s recent decision in favour of automatic release – without applying for remission – of prisoners who have served their terms, after being sentenced to fixed term life imprisonment without remission. While the order is a respite for prisoners against excessively punitive life imprisonment sentences, the court’s adjudication of the doctrinal logic behind remission, continues (and does not interfere with) the arbitrariness in judicial sentencing in death penalty cases.What all this meansIncreasing criminalisation accompanies reduced expectations from the prosecution, indifference towards the rights of accused persons and under-trials, heightened powers of the police, harsher penalties for those convicted and extra-judicial penalties for those who are not. The developments in criminal law in 2025 showcase a pattern unfolding in the criminal justice system. In this pattern, it is becoming easier to bring someone into the criminal justice fold, while exit is increasingly harder.Saniya Rizwan is a Research Associate at The Square Circle Clinic, NALSAR University of Law. The author would like to thank Professor Anup Surendranath, Executive Director, The Square Circle Clinic for his inputs.