The fourteen-year-old trial in the Nitish Katara murder case came to a close on Monday with the Supreme Court ordering that Vikas Yadav — son of former MP DP Yadav — and his cousin Vishal Yadav will have to undergo 25 years of incarceration without grant of remission. The SC upheld 20 years of prisons sentence awarded by the Delhi High Court to Sukhdev Pehelwan, who assisted the two cousins to burn and dispose of the body.
The Bench of Justices Dipak Misra and C Nagappan had on August 17, 2015 upheld the conviction of both Yadav brothers and their associate and refused to alter this conclusion arrived at by the Delhi High Court in April 2014. The present decision was limited to examining the quantum of sentence imposed by the High Court.
The trial court had directed both Yadav brothers to undergo life imprisonment whereas the HC ordered them to undergo 25 years on charge of murder (IPC Section 302) and another five years on charge of destruction of evidence (IPC Section 201). Both sentences were to run one after the other. Also, the HC had directed that the accused will not get benefit of remission till they had undergone 30 years jail term.
Although the Yadavs employed the services of ace criminal lawyers UR lalit and Shekhar Naphade to seek a lenient punishment, the apex court refused to show any mercy to them.
The Bench said, “Freedom, independence, constitutional identity, individual choice and thought of a woman to be a wife or sister or daughter or mother cannot be allowed to be curtailed definitely not by application of physical force or threat or mental cruelty in the name of his self-assumed honour… and to impose so called brotherly or fatherly honor or class honour by eliminating her choice is a crime of extreme brutality, more so, when it is done under a guise.”
The Bench upheld the 25-year jail term on Yadavs and 20-year jail for Sukhdev Pehelwan. The remaining five-year jail term awarded to Yadavs for destruction of evidence was directed to be concurrent instead of consecutive, this being the only change from the earlier position held by the HC.
The two brothers had killed Katara, the son of an IAS officer, on the intervening night of February 16 and 17, 2002 for having an affair with Bharti Yadav.
Though the prosecution and the victim’s kin had demanded death penalty claiming the case to be an honour killing, the apex court did not entertain the same since the trial court had awarded life term as the maximum punishment.
The Bench said, “From the evidence brought on record as well as the analysis made by the High Court, it is demonstrable about the criminal proclivity of the accused persons, for they have neither the respect for human life nor did they have any concern for the dignity of a dead person. The brutality that has been displayed by the accused persons clearly exposes the depraved state of mind.”