The Delhi High Court on Thursday declined to set aside a trial court order which convicted a man of raping a woman, inserting sticks in her private parts and strangling her to death. A division bench of Justice Mukta Gupta and Justice Poonam A Bamba noted in its order, “.as per the MLC [medico-legal case] of the appellant number of injuries were found on his body indicating struggle at the time of rape and murder of the deceased. Thus these two clothes i.e. the shawl recovered from the spot and underwear of the deceased found inserted in her vagina, which both had the semen of the appellant as per DNA analysis, clinch the case of the prosecution that appellant committed the rape of the deceased, brutally inserted sticks in her vagina and anal cavities, tied her and strangulated her to death.” Going through the “circumstantial evidence” presented by the prosecution, the high court said that the same “unerringly point towards the guilt of the appellant in having committed the offence of murder and rape of the victim beyond reasonable doubt”. The court dismissed the accused’s plea observing that it “finds no error” in the trial court order. The judgment was passed in a plea by a man challenging his conviction and life imprisonment awarded by a trial court in May 2018 after holding him guilty for the rape and murder of a woman, who was in her early thirties. Considering the nature of the offence, the bench also issued notice to the man seeking his response as to why his sentence should not be modified to a fixed term as per a 2016 judgment of the Supreme Court in Union of India vs V Sriharan. “Superintendent Tihar Jail is directed to produce the appellant in court on 19th May, 2023,” the high court directed. According to the prosecution, the woman’s husband had in January 2015 reported her missing when she did not return home from work. The next morning, police found the half-naked body of the woman with her neck and legs tied with a cloth in South Delhi. During the investigation, it was revealed that there were frequent calls between the victim and the accused. The man was tracked down and arrested on the basis of the call details. In his defence, the man claimed that the prosecution had failed to establish his guilt beyond reasonable doubt and, therefore, the trial court erred in convicting him and that his appeal be allowed.
