In a significant judgment, the Supreme Court on July 16 commuted the death sentence of a man convicted of raping and murdering a 10-year-old girl in Uttarakhand to life imprisonment without the possibility of remission. The apex court bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath, Sanjay Karol, and Sandeep Mehta noted that both the trial court and the Uttarakhand High Court relied solely on the brutality of the crime to justify capital punishment, without adequately weighing other circumstances.
The convict had challenged the January 2020 high court verdict that upheld his conviction and the death penalty. According to the prosecution, in July 2018, the man lured the child into his hut under the pretext of buying her sweets and later raped and killed her. The court said, “A simple afternoon of play and frolic with family members yielded catastrophic results for a 10-year-old female child… the most innocent desire of either a candy or a toy was exploited in the worst manner possible.”
Evidence included the recovery of the victim’s body from the convict’s hut, the last-seen theory, and DNA analysis. While affirming the conviction, the top court criticized the lower courts for not discussing the “rarest of rare” threshold thoroughly. It emphasized that the courts failed to assess aggravating and mitigating circumstances before arriving at the death sentence.
The bench considered reports from the district probation officer, jail authorities, and psychological evaluations, which highlighted the convict’s deprived background. The convict, from a financially distressed family in Ayodhya, had started working at the age of 12 and had never attended school due to poverty.
“In view of the mitigating circumstances and absence of a comprehensive evaluation by the lower courts, we deem it appropriate to award life imprisonment without remission till the natural life of the appellant, instead of the death penalty,” the court ruled.
