Terming the crime as "horrific" that merited "no forgiveness", the court upheld the "circumstantial evidence" presented by the prosecution, despite the "absence of direct evidence". The court ordered that the accused 'be hanged by the neck until he is dead' and awarded a compensation of Rs 5 lakhs to the parents of the victim.
A special Protection of Children against Sexual Offences (POCSO) court in Limkheda of Dahod district awarded death sentence to a 32-year-old man for murder and attempt to rape a 2 1/2-year-old victim in 2018. The court held that “sympathy in any form” in heinous crimes “would be misplaced and shake the confidence in the criminal justice system”.
Classifying the case among the “rarest of rare” as it “snatched away the life of a toddler, who had barely begun to live and had no understanding of life”, Dahod Additional Sessions Judge BS Parmar, in an order delivered on August 30, rejected all pleas of the defence counsel seeking a mild punishment for the accused who was aged 27 when he committed the crime. The court also awarded a compensation of Rs 5 lakh to the parents of the victim.
The court also cited 12 verdicts of various high courts and the Supreme Court, including the 2017 SC verdict in the Delhi Nirbhaya case, while convicting the accused under the Indian Penal Code sections for murder (302), rape and inflicting injury that causes the death of the woman [376(A)], rape on a person under 16 years of age, on the person suffering a mental and physical disability, causing bodily harm during sexual assault [376(2)(f),(i), and (j)] and relevant sections of the POCSO Act.
The case pertains to an incident on September 16, 2018, when the accused took away the victim from the custody of her great grandfather—the complainant in the FIR—on the pretext of buying her chips from a nearby shop in the village. When the child did not return for over 2 hours, the family began a search, and later, the decomposed body of the child was recovered from a deserted location on the outskirts of the village the next day. According to the prosecution’s case, the child had died due to the force exerted on her nose, face and neck during the sexual assault.
“The court must respond to the cry of the society and settle what could be a deterrent punishment for what was an apparently abominable crime,” the court noted.
“The court cannot consider issues such as the financial status of the accused, his age, the condition of his family or his responsibility towards the family, the absence of any past criminal record or his good behaviour in jail as an undertrial or the hope that he will reform and other mitigating circumstances… The offence is vile, horrific, and disgusting. Considering the facts of the case, there is no reason present to show any compassion towards the accused. Moreover, the accused has no remorse,” the judge observed in the order as he dismissed all pleas for a mild sentence.
Terming the crime “horrific” and merited “no forgiveness”, the court upheld the “circumstantial evidence” presented by the prosecution, despite the “absence of direct evidence”.
“The conduct of the accused does not indicate that he can reform and become part of society again; in fact, he is a threat to society and so the crime committed does not impact just the victim and her parents, but the society at large,” the court said.
The court held that although the accused may have not intended to murder the child, “indulging in a crime that one knows could result in the death of the victim, is equal to murder”. It added that although there was no direct witness to the sexual assault and the medical evidence did not prove that the child had been raped, there was sufficient evidence, including injuries indicated on her private parts in the post-mortem report, to prove that there was an attempted sexual assault on the toddler.
Source: indianexpress.com, Staff, September 3, 2022
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde