Four persons who were awarded the death sentence by the Supreme Court have sought clemency from President Pranab Mukherjee. Mukherjee has, however, not taken any decision on these petitions yet, sources said. “So far we have not received any reply from the President’s House. A decision would be taken soon,” a senior official in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said. All four convicts were sentenced to death between 2006-2012, but their petitions reached the Centre only last month. The MHA, which receives mercy petitions from states before they are forwarded to the President, has recommended rejection of clemency in all four cases. The first two convicts — sisters Renuka Kiran Shinde and Seema Mohan Gavit — were sent to the gallows in 2006 by the Supreme Court, which had ruled that they were “depraved and unlikely to reform themselves if given a second chance at life”. The Pune-based sisters were arrested in 1996 for kidnapping 13 children, forcing them to commit crimes and killing them in order to avoid suspicion. The third convict is dacoit Sonu Sardar who killed five members of a family in Chhattisgarh house in 2004. He was convicted on the eye-witness account of a 10-year-old girl who had managed to escape from the house. The sentence was pronounced by a trial court, upheld by the Chhattisgarh High Court and then by the Supreme Court in 2012. The court had said that “even though the appellant was young, his criminal propensities are beyond reform”. The fourth petition relates to a case in which a man was sentenced to death for killing his wife and five children at Manasa in Madhya Pradesh in 2006. The convict, Jagdish, had pleaded before the apex court that he was in an unsound state of mind when the crime was committed and asked that his sentence be commuted to life as it had not been executed for over three years. The court, however, upheld his death sentence in 2009. President Mukherjee has, in a little less than two years in office, rejected 11 mercy petitions awarding death penalty to 17 convicts.
