The Supreme Court has ordered that an accused held for rape and murder of minor victims should be hanged as such offences henceforth will fall in the rarest of rare category.
Treating minor victims as a special class, SC for the first time has carved out a special category among rape followed by murder offences, where death penalty will be mandatory. This may also assuage the public outrage over rape and murder crimes in the country, where the courts were seen to let-off the accused with even a life term, despite noting the sheer brutality of the crime.
While murders are considered to be heinous crimes, certain murders shock the collective conscience of the community and court. Starting on this premise, the bench of Justices CK Prasad and Kurian Joseph said, “Heinous rape of minors followed by murder is one such instance of a crime which shocks and repulses the collective conscience of the community and court.” Such crimes, it held, “which shock the collective conscience of the society and calls for extreme revulsion in the minds of the people, are to be treated as the rarest of rare category.”
The crime which came up for consideration was of a similar nature. A 19-year-old had raped a five-year old child where the victim was later killed, packed into a sack and dumped in a train on December 23, 2002. He was tried and sentenced to death on April 2004. Seven months later, the Rajasthan HC commuted his punishment to life term. The appeal came after a delay of nine years.
The court was convinced that such a crime fell into the rarest of rare category and deserved death sentence. But reviving the death after nine years deterred the court to re-impose the trial court verdict. But for the future, the court wished to avoid such a dilemma by ordering that cases where enhancement of life sentence to death is sought, particularly those involving minors, must be decided on priority.
Realising that the life term granted to the accused could be misused by the executive or jail authorities to recommend him remission, the court devised the law further to hold that even where the convict will have to undergo the minimum punishment prescribed by the law. The accused in the case was charged under IPC Sections 302 (murder), 376 (rape) and 201 (disappearance of evidence) which carry a minimum sentence of 14 years, seven years and three years. The Court directed that remission would take effect only after the accused underwent these sentences one after the other.
For granting future remissions, the court directed the States and the Centre to bear in mind that “punishment has a penological purpose” and it was the parliament, while enacting IPC prescribed a minimum punishment for each crime. If that was so, “the Government being its delegate, cannot interfere with the same in exercise of their power, for remission or commutation.” Doing so would not only defeat the purpose of the punishment but also reduce the entire sentencing by the court into a “mockery”, the bench added.