Brutality not sole criterion for extreme penalty: Supreme Court

NEW DELHI: Brutality of offence cannot be the sole criterion to award death punishment and mitigating circumstances , including socio-economic background and psychological state of the convict, must also be considered, Supreme Court has said while commuting the death sentence of two convicts in two different cases. It condemned them to spend the rest of their lives in jail without the possibility of remission.

Though trial courts and high courts in both cases had awarded death, a bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sanjay Karol and Sandeep Mehta commuted the sentences and granted them life sentences with the condition that they have to die in jail.

In one case, the convict from Ballari district in Karnataka had killed his wife, three children and sister-in-law in 2017 due to suspicion that he was not the biological father of the children and they were born out of infidelity. In the other case, a daily wage earner had raped and strangulated a 10-year-old girl in 2018 in Dehradun.

The court held that in both cases, trial court and HC decided the punishment on the basis of barbaric and ruthless manner of committing the crime and mitigating circumstances were not considered. “Courts below have only commented on the brutality of crime in question, to hand down the death penalty to the appellant. No other circumstance came to be discussed by the courts in reaching the conclusion that the case forms part of the ‘rarest of rare’ category. Such an approach in our view cannot be sustained,” it said.