TS HC commutes death sentence of three rape-convicts to imprisonment till death

HYDERABAD: The Telangana High Court commuted the death sentences of three convicts in the November 2019 gang-rape and murder of a 30-year-old tribal woman in Adilabad district’s Yellapatar to life imprisonment. They will be in custody without remission till their death.

Shaik Babu, Shaik Shabuddin and Shaik Maqdhoom were awarded the death penalty, to be hanged to death, in 2020 by the designated special court for speedy trial. As the sentence issued needed confirmation by the High Court, it was forwarded as ‘referred trial’.

The three also filed an appeal before the High Court challenging the death sentence. These were heard together by the division bench of the High Court, comprising Justice P. Naveen Rao and Justice Juvvadi Sri Devi.

The High Court viewed that the trial court was not justified in awarding death sentence while treating the case as a ‘rarest of rare.’.

The bench opined that the convicts followed the woman with an intention to rape her and not for murder. Hence, the element of ‘pre-planning’ is missing. After raping her, the three, apprehending that they would be in trouble if she disclosed the incident, murdered her.

Hence, their action cannot be categorised as “extremely brutal”, “grotesque”, “diabolical”, “revolting” or “carried out in a dastardly manner so as to arouse intense and extreme indignation of the community”.

The magnitude of the crime was limited to an individual and did not involve elimination of a family, or a large number of persons of a particular community or locality. Thus, the case does not fulfill the tests prescribed in Bachan Singh and Machhi Singh cases, through which the apex court defined ‘rarest of rare’. The High Court also considered that the convicts were married and had four children each.

Citing various judgments by the Supreme Court in converting the death sentence to life imprisonment, the bench observed that by asking to confirm the death sentence to the convicts, society and the State admit that they were incapable of reforming them. By throwing a young life into the mouth of death, the society and the State were abdicating their primary duty of reforming offenders.

The bench said that there is no doubt that the offence was heinous. But a via-media has to be discovered to reform them, so also to protect the society from them.

‘The via-media also permits the court to balance the twin aspects of Article 21 of the Constitution of India, while it limits the personal liberty of the accused, it does not deprive the accused of his life. Therefore, such a term of punishment would, indeed, be in consonance with Article 21 of the Constitution of India – an Article which has been held to be the heart and soul of the Constitution of India,” the bench stated, recalling Supreme Court observations.