Three days before the brutal gang-rape of Nirbhaya, the Supreme Court commuted death sentence to life for a 23 year-old man who killed a 65 year-old woman and raped her pregnant 25 year-old grand daughter-in-law in an upscale Pune neighborhood in September 2007.
The SC took a lenient view on the ground that the convict was under the influence of liquor and so he was not aware of what he was doing. It was also believed that he was not incapable of being reformed and what he did was not the rarest of rare crime which could warrant death penalty.
The judges were: Justice Swatantar Kumar and Justice Madan Lokur. Judges are also human beings. Subjective thinking of a man or a woman is different from person to person, occasion to occasion and from time to time. To err is human. Values keep changing and nothing is perfect in this world. The murder of a senior citizen with 22 stabbings and severing of four fingers in one hand and chopping of a wrist on the other hand as well as raping of a pregnant grand daughter-in-law after stabbing 19 times and also boasting outside that he had killed two women and he was not afraid of any one – all these acts can’t be construed as the rarest of rare crime in the eye of the Apex court of law in this country as lamented by the husband of the rape-victim who wants to take up the matter in review by the SC. The SC bench held that the killer’s abnormal behavior was relevant in holding against the death penalty.
If the judgment were to be delivered after December 16, 2012, the SC would have confirmed the death sentence looking to the mood of the nation perhaps.
How to ensure the impartial and the irrevocable judgment in the final analysis?
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