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SC pulls up Bombay high court for acquitting child rapist

The Supreme Court has passed strictures against the Bombay high court for giving a clean chit to an accused, who had been awarded death penalty by the sessions court for the rape and murder of a four-year-old girl.

''It is disconcerting that a case like this in which the prosecution has presented such reliable and formidable circumstances forming into a complete chain and pointing unerringly to the irresistible conclusion that the little girl Gangu was raped and killed by none other than the accused, Suresh himself, ended in unmerited acquittal from the division bench of the high court. Criminal justice unfortunately became a casualty in this case when the high court side-stepped all such circumstances and exonerated the culprit of such a grotesque crime,'' observed a division bench comprising Justices G T Nanavati and K T Thomas while setting aside the verdict of the high court and allowing an appeal by the Maharashtra government.

The rapist, Suresh, accused of raping and murdering an eight-year-old girl in an earlier case in which he was acquitted, had abducted Sneha endearingly called Gangu from her house and decoyed her to a field at Arvi (in Wardha district of Maharashtra). After the rape and murder, the mangled body of the child was dumped in a field where pulses and cotton were cultivated. Suresh was convicted and condemned to death penalty by the sessions court but was exonerated by the high court which proclaimed him not guilty. Hence the appeal by the state of Maharashtra.

The Supreme Court said in its judgment that there was not even a speck of doubt that Gangu was kidnapped from her house and raped and killed by somebody on the evening of December 22, 1995.

In fact, the sessions court and the high court concurrently found the aforesaid point affirmatively. The whole endeavour was, therefore, confined to the question whether the crime was committed by the respondent, the court added.

The court pointed out that the high court focussed on the circumstances which the prosecution presented through the evidence for proving that the culprit in the ghastly infanticide was the respondent himself and none else. ''The sessions judge found that all those circumstances were established and they formed themselves into a complete chain unerringly pointing to the guilt of the respondent. But the high court differed from the findings of the sessions court regarding some of the circumstances and that resulted in the exoneration of the respondent,'' the court observed.

The court, therefore, set aside the impugned judgment and restored the conviction passed by the sessions court. As regards the sentence, the court said it has concurred with the sessions court that the extreme penalty of death can be chosen for a such a crime. But as the accused was once acquitted by the high court, the court refrained from imposing that extreme penalty in spite of the fact that ''this case is perilously near the region of the rarest of the rare cases envisaged by a Constitution Bench in Bachan Singh vs State of Punjab (1980) case.

''However the lesser option is not unquestionably foreclosed and we alter the sentence, in regard to the offence under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code (murder) to imprisonment for life. The sentences imposed by the sessions court on all other counts would remain unaltered,'' the judges added.

UNI

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