Mumbai: Dismissing the petition filed by the convicts of Shakti Mill gangrape case, which challenged the Constitutional validity of the legal provisions under which they were sentenced to death in 2014, the Bombay High Court upheld the Constitutional validity of the Indian Penal Code.
A division bench of Justices B P Dharmadhikari and Revati Dere dismissed the petition, reported the Indian Express. The bench upheld the validity of provisions of 376E of the Indian Penal Code which states that a repeat rape offender should be imprisoned for the entire life.
“We are of the opinion that section 376 (e) of the IPC is not ultra vires to the Constitution and hence need not be quashed in the present case,” the court said.
The petition was filed by Vijay Jadhav, Mohammed Kasim and Mohammed Salim Ansari — all sentenced to death by a session court in 2014 for raping a journalist in 2013. The three were also convicted for raping a call centre employee.
The trials for both the crimes were simultaneously held. The trial court proceeded to pronounce the punishment in the call centre employee case and subsequently allowed a prosecution plea to charge the convicts under Section 376E.
