Legal news 10.2.2022
The Supreme Court on Wednesday commuted the death sentence of a man convicted for raping and killing a seven-year-old girl, to life imprisonment [Pappu vs State of UP]. A three-judge bench of Justices AM Khanwilkar, Dinesh Maheshwari and CT Ravikumar passed the judgment on the ground that there is a possibility of reformation since the convict did not have any criminal antecedents and was not a hardened criminal. "When the appellant is not shown to be a person having criminal antecedents and is not a hardened criminal, it cannot be said that there is no probability of him being reformed and rehabilitated. His unblemished jail conduct and having a family of wife, children and aged father would also indicate towards the probability of his reformation. It would, therefore, be unsafe to treat this case as falling in ‘rarest of rare’ category, the Court added. The Court noted that the accused, who at the time of commission of offence was 35 years old, had indeed lured the seven year old to have lychee fruits. Thereafter, not only did he rape the girl, but he also murdered the girl and dumped her in garbage after having dragged her dead body for over a kilometre. The top court upheld trial court and High Court order convicting the accused under Section 302 of IPC for murder. However the apex court differed with regard to the sentence handed down to the accused. It held that the lower court and High Court orders awarding and confirming death sentence were based on assumptive conclusions. The impugned orders awarding and confirming death sentence could only be said to be of assumptive conclusions, where it has been assumed that death sentence has to be awarded because of the ghastly crime and its abhorrent nature," the Supreme Court said. The tests and the norms laid down in the relevant decisions commencing from those in Bachan Singh for awarding death penalty, were not properly considered by the courts below, the apex court opined. The Court agreed that heinous nature of crime like that of present one, in brutal rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl child, definitely disclosed aggravating circumstances, particularly when the manner of its commission showed depravity and shocked the conscience.