The Supreme Court remitted the death penalty of a man accused of raping and murdering a juvenile to life in prison, considering the possibility and likelihood of the defendant’s reformation and rehabilitation.
The obvious and indisputable fact that the appellant had no criminal histories and comes from a poor socioeconomic background, as well as his pristine conduct inside the jail, cannot go ignored,” the Supreme Court concluded. Ins conclusion, Supreme Court said that the current case cannot be classified as one of the rarest of rare circumstances in which there is no other option except to inflict the death penalty, according to the Supreme Court.
The judgement of the Madhya Pradesh Hig h Court convicting the man for the offence punishable under IPC Section 302 and 376(2)(i), as well as the offence punishable under Section 6 of the POCSO Act, was affirmed by a bench of justices AM Khanwilkar, Dinesh Maheshwari, and CT Ravikumar. The Supreme Court sentenced the offender to life in prison, with actual incarceration of 30 (thirty) years as well as no use of certain conditions of premature remission.
Punishment under Section 9 of the POCSO Act for a minor used for pornographic purposes is a minimum of eight years in jail, with a maximum sentence of ten years in prison and a fine. The opinion of the Supreme Court is quite different and out of the box. In its opinion, life imprisonment should be given in those cases when there is no alternative.
The Supreme Court stated that the atrocious and horrific nature of the crime, namely, the brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old female child who is none other than his own cousin’s daughter, that too in a hopeless scenario, is undeniably aggravating.
Even if there is a slight possibility that the culprit is striving to improve himself and wants a second chance, life imprisonment seems to be the only way to go. The goal is to improve a person from the inside out so that their thinking begins to transform. The number of crimes would eventually decline.
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