Eighteen years after the chilling tandoor murder case shook the nation, the Supreme Court (SC) on Tuesday commuted the death penalty awarded to former Youth Congress leader Sushil Sharma, who was convicted of killing his wife Naina Sahni and burning her body in a tandoor. He will remain in jail his entire life subject to any remission granted by the State or Central Government.
While the scale of brutality of the incident prompted the trial court in 2003 and Delhi High Court in 2007, to award death penalty to Sharma, the apex court found gaps in the investigation by the police and went on to hold that brutality alone was not sufficient to justify the death sentence. The bench, comprising Chief Justice P Sathasivam and Justices Ranjana P Desai and Ranjan Gogoi held that the 18-year-old crime that occurred on July 2-3, 1995 was the outcome of a “strained personal relationship.”
By this logic, the SC distinguished the incident to be not an offence against society as a whole. The court also took note of the fact that the convict had spent ten years on death row and had no criminal antecedents to show he was a “confirmed criminal.”
This paved the way for the possibility of him getting reformed and rehabilitated.What came in favour of Sharma was also the fact that when he saw the body of his wife he wept. This showed he was not remorseless, the court noted.
The judgement written by Justice Desai took note of the “possessive” nature of Sharma that drove him to suspect his wife’s fidelity, leading to her murder.
The SC found certain gaps in the investigation as no weapon was recovered to show Sharma had chopped the body. Even a second post-mortem report created a doubt that dislocation (of bones) could be due to burning of the body. The SC held that the victim was an independent woman, capable of taking her own decisions as she was a qualified pilot apart from being the State General Secretary of Youth Congress (Girl’s Wing), Delhi. All this showed that Sharma was not in a dominant position in the relationship.