Justice is a slow burn. In the backwaters of Karnataka, it’s less of a burn and more of a decade-long smolder that finally caught light this week. A district court in Koppal just handed down the death penalty to three men for the 2014 gang-rape of an Israeli tourist and the murder of a local youth.

It took ten years. Think about that. In tech time, ten years is three generations of hardware, five pivots into "the next big thing," and a complete overhaul of how we perceive privacy and safety. In the Indian legal system, it’s just the time it takes to get the paperwork in order. The convicts—Yeriswamy, Hanumantha, and Rangappa—aren't just names on a docket anymore; they’re the faces of a brutality that "Incredible India" marketing campaigns try very hard to Photoshop out of the brochure.

The details are the kind of grim that sticks to your ribs. Back in 2014, near the ruins of Anegundi—a place people visit to find themselves or post high-contrast photos of boulders on Instagram—the world turned ugly. An Israeli backpacker was targeted. A local man, who had the audacity to try and intervene, was murdered. It’s the sort of visceral, analog violence that reminds us how thin the veneer of "global connectivity" really is. You can have 5G in the valley, but that doesn’t mean the shadows are any less dangerous.

We talk a lot about safety tech. We’ve got SOS buttons on our phones, GPS tracking for solo travelers, and "safety apps" that promise to alert your emergency contacts if you stop moving for too long. But here’s the friction: none of that matters when the infrastructure of human decency fails. The trade-off we’ve made for a hyper-connected world is the illusion of safety. We think because we can see ourselves on a map, someone else can see us too. They can’t.

This verdict is being hailed as a win for the judiciary. Maybe it is. But handing out a death sentence in 2024 for a crime committed when the iPhone 6 was the pinnacle of technology feels like a glitch in the simulation. It’s a harsh, final response to a crime that has likely already faded from the public’s short-term memory. The court is trying to send a message. "We see you," the gavel says. "Even if it takes us a decade to find the right glasses."

The legal cost of this ten-year saga is its own kind of tragedy. The state spends millions on these protracted trials, keeping the gears grinding while victims and their families are left in a holding pattern. The Israeli tourist moved on, hopefully finding some semblance of peace back home, while the family of the murdered youth lived with a hole in their lives that no court order can patch. That’s the "user experience" of the Indian court system—laggy, prone to crashing, and incredibly expensive to maintain.

There’s a certain cynical irony in the timing. We’re currently obsessed with AI-driven surveillance and "Smart Cities" that are supposed to predict crime before it happens. Yet, here we are, still dealing with the fallout of a low-tech, high-horror crime from a decade ago. It’s a reminder that no amount of code can fix a culture that produces this kind of entitlement and violence.

The death penalty is a rare move in India. It’s reserved for the "rarest of rare" cases. The judge in Koppal clearly decided that this qualified. But does the rope actually solve the problem, or does it just close the tab on a particularly messy browser window? It provides a sense of closure for the headlines, but it doesn't change the fact that for every high-profile tourist case that makes it to a verdict, there are thousands of others that get buried in the data dump of the lower courts.

We like to think that justice is an algorithm—input the crime, process the evidence, output the punishment. But in reality, it’s a manual process, prone to human error, political interference, and the sheer exhaustion of time.

So, three men go to the gallows. The tourist remains a statistic in a travel advisory. The youth stays dead. We’ll all check our phones, see the notification, and feel a momentary sense of "justice served" before scrolling to the next outrage.

Is a ten-year wait for a hanging a sign that the system works, or just proof that it’s broken beyond repair?