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Here's some additional context from his wikipedia page: "According to the CBI, Perarivalan confessed on August 14, 1991, and August 15, 1991 to purchasing the batteries making him the main suspect. Right from the start, Perarivalan had firmly stated that his confession statements were distorted.[17] He has since said that he was unaware of the purpose for which he was buying the batteries, and has consistently maintained his innocence.[18] Perarivalan would repeatedly say during his time in jail that giving a battery shouldn't equate to him knowing about the plot.
Perarivalan's case took a turn in 2013 when V. Thiagarajan, a former CBI superintendent of police, acknowledged to tampering with his confession in a documentary by filmmakers from the People's Movement Against the Death Penalty, that he did not take down his statement verbatim."
It's a lecture organized by a criminal justice reform research center at a law school to hear from a person who believes and maintains he is innocent but spent 30 years of his life in jail despite the fact that one of the investigating officers admitted to tampering with the accused's statement. And we don't want to hear about it? The guy is free now. The highest court of the land set him free. And we don't want to listen to a person who could have shared their harrowing journey with India's broken criminal justice system so MAYBE we can try to learn from it and fix it.
BUT NO. We're judge-y as fuck and there's no way we're open minded enough to change our ill-informed pre-conceived notions when somebody attempts to present a different perspective.
Shame.
There are serious doubts about whether this guy even committed a crime in this case. I used Wikipedia because I didn’t have the patience to find and cite sources seeing as I’m writing a comment on an online forum and not an academic paper but here you go you lazy judgy ▮▮▮. Take your pick of sources that you won’t immediately label and dismiss. Or find your own, I don’t care.
The Hindu -
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/former-cbi-official-says-he-did-not-record-perarivalans-confession-verbatim/article5384370.ece
Times of India -
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/ex-cbi-man-altered-rajiv-death-accuseds-statement/articleshow/26283700.cms
The intent of the lecture was to learn from a first-person account of someone who lost 31 years, i.e. close to half of their only life, because an unethical police officer without a conscience manipulated the accused’s statement. 31 years. I haven’t even turned 30 yet and this guy had wrongfully been in prison longer than I’ve been alive. He was 19 or 20 I think when he was imprisoned. Can you even imagine how that might feel like? 19 / 20 year olds are usually second / third year college students.
Anyway, if you bothered to pay attention at all, the intent of the lecture was “…”.