Delhi High Court: The recent judgment passed by a bench comprising of S. Muralidhar and I. S. Mehta,JJ., held that ‘life imprisonment’ should be awarded when the accused has a chance of rehabilitation and reformation.
The brief facts of the case being that three accused namely Ravi Kapoor (A-1), Amit Shukla (A-2 ) and Baljeet Malik @ Poppy (A-3), were convicted for the killing of Jigisha Ghosh, daughter of J.N. Ghosh, following which the three accused were charged under the Sections (364/302/201/394/468/471/482/34 of IPC) and A-1 was additionally charged for the offence under Section 25 of the Arms Act.
The deceased had been working as an Operations Manager in Hewitt Associates Private Limited for the last 5 years prior to her death, and on 18th of March, 2009, she was abducted by the three accused, and further a series of events unfolded when the accused started using the ATM card of the deceased, as a result of which the police was able to track them down based on their ATM card transaction details.
The Trial Court awarded death penalty to A-1 and A-2, along with fine and simple imprisonment for 6 months, and had further awarded life imprisonment to A-3, along with fine, as a consequence of which, the three accused filed individual appeals questioning their conviction, before the present court. This Court while passing its judgment relied on landmark cases like Gurvail Singh v. State of Punjab [(2013) 2 SCC 713], Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab [(1980) 2 SCC 684 : AIR 1980 SC 898], where the court held that “life sentence is the rule and death sentence the exception”.
Further reliance was placed on Aloke Nath Dutta v. State of West Bengal [(2007) 12 SCC 230] and Mohinder Singh v. State of Punjab, (2013) 3 SCC 294 : AIR 2013 SC 3622, where the Apex Court observed that-
“the doctrine of ‘rarest of rare’ requires two aspects to be satisfied:
· First being, the case must fall under the ambit of ‘rarest of rare’ and
· Secondly, if the alternative option is unquestionably foreclosed, i.e. death penalty should be the last resort, and to be looked to only when alternative punishment of life imprisonment is futile and serves no purpose”.
Furthermore, this Court observed that-
“in life sentence, there is a possibility of achieving deterrence, rehabilitation and retribution in different degrees. But the same does not hold true for the death penalty. It is unique in its absolute rejection of the potential of convict to rehabilitate and reform. It extinguishes life and thereby terminates the being, therefore, puts an end anything to do with the life. This is the big difference between two punishments. Thus, before imposing death penalty, it is imperative to consider the same”.
Hence, with the above observation, this Court held that the following case does not fall under the ambit of ‘rarest of rare’ case and thus, commuted the death penalty awarded by trial court into life imprisonment for the accused (A-1 and A-2). [State v. Ravi Kapoor, 2018 SCC OnLine Del 6400, decided on 04.01.2018]