New Delhi, Sep 24 The Supreme Court on Thursday commuted the death sentence given to a man, who subjected her six-year-old step-daughter to repeated sexual assault and strangled her to death, to a jail term for remainder of his natural life.
A bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta and Vijay Bishnoi delivered the verdict on an appeal filed by the convict challenging a 2019 judgement by the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s Indore bench, which affirmed his conviction and death sentence in the case.
“The crime is of the utmost gravity, and it is marked by an exceptional aggravating feature, but the mitigating circumstances of the appellant are genuine and substantial, the possibility of his reformation has not been excluded by the State upon whom the burden lay,” the bench said.
It said the sentence handed down to the 56-year-old convict by the top court was of “utmost severity”, second only to death sentence, and it would confine him within the walls of a prison for the remainder of his life without the prospect of release by way of remission.
Referring to the testimony of the victim’s mother about the incident, the bench said it was reliable and was corroborated by objective medical evidence and by phone records.
“A mother is, in the considered view of this court, ordinarily the last person who would shield the murderer of her own child and substitute an innocent man in his place,” it said.
The top court said sexual abuse of a child within the household, in particular, was perpetrated in secrecy, and the persons ordinarily present were the perpetrator, the child and, if at all, a member of the household who is powerless to prevent it.
In such cases, to insist upon the kind of corroboration that might be available in a crime committed in the open, would be to insist upon a standard that the very nature of the offence renders impossible, and “would be to grant to those who prey upon children within the home an immunity founded upon the secrecy in which they cloak their crime”, the bench said.
The bench said throttling of the victim was witnessed by the mother, who saw the appellant with both hands upon the throat of the child, and the sexual assault was spoken to by the minor herself in the disclosure she made to her mother.
“The victim, silenced in life, is not silenced in law, and her voice, reaching the court through her mother and confirmed by the marks upon her body, bears witness to what was done to her,” Justice Nath, who penned the 157-page verdict, said.
The apex court found no infirmity in the concurrent findings of the trial court and the high court in so far as they hold the appellant guilty of offences, including that of murder under the erstwhile Indian Penal Code and under the provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.
“We are constrained to observe, at the outset and with candour, that the manner in which the question of sentence was dealt with by the trial court did not conform to the standard that the law requires,” it said.
The bench noted that the trial court had convicted the appellant and sentenced him to death on the same day in December 2018.
It said section 235(2) of the erstwhile Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) mandated that after conviction, the accused be heard on the question of sentence before the same was pronounced.
“This requirement is not an empty formality,” it said.
The bench said gravity of a crime, taken alone, has never been sufficient under the law of this country to warrant the sentence of death, “for if it were, the rarest of rare doctrine would collapse into a simple measurement of the enormity of the offence, and the mandate to weigh the criminal would be rendered nugatory”.
It said sentence of death is reserved not for gravest crimes as a class, but for those cases within the gravest class in which, after the circumstances of the criminal have been weighed, the alternative of life imprisonment is found to be unquestionably foreclosed.
In its verdict, the bench noted that according to the National Family Health Survey conducted in the years 2019 to 2021, approximately 29.3 per cent of ever-married women in India in the age group of 18 to 49 years reported having experienced physical or sexual violence at the hands of their spouse.
It said as per the survey, of the women who had experienced such violence, around three-fourth never sought help from any quarter and never so much as disclosed the violence to any person.
“These figures, drawn from the largest such survey in the country, establish that the silence of abused woman is not exception but the norm, and that the inability to report is the overwhelmingly common response and not an aberration calling for suspicion,” it said.
According to the prosecution, the appellant had subjected his own step-daughter to repeated sexual assault within the home, and thereafter strangled her to death.
The bench noted that the solitary eyewitness to the events was the mother of the victim — wife of the appellant.
It also noted that during the hearing in the matter before the apex court, it emerged that cross-examination of the victim’s mother was conducted at the trial by a legal aid counsel appointed on the very day on which her testimony was recorded.
In May 2025, the top court had directed further cross-examination of the victim’s mother, which was carried out.
The appellant had claimed that he was falsely implicated in the case.
(PTI News)
