‘Barbarity dripping down from evidence’: Madhya Pradesh High Court upholds death penalty for rape, murder of 5-year-old girl

Justice Vivek Agarwal and Ramkumar Choubey observed that the accused has committed a “heinous crime” of sexually assaulting and killing a child, suggesting a “barbarous act of lusty mind”. (Image is enhanced using AI)

“It is evident that after committing sexual assault, when the breathing of the girl-child was muted, the appellant/accused had put her dead body in a plastic tank…This shows that a barbarity of act is dripping down from every ounce of evidence,” the order held.

Findings

• The crime does not find a place in modern penology, and the fundamental concept of penology in India is reformative.
• The existence of the death penalty in penal provisions is regulated by the legal proposition that capital punishment can only be awarded in the rarest of rare cases, and a sentence imposed should not violate Article 21 of the Constitution.
• The prosecution has successfully established the involvement of the accused in the crime beyond any doubt with forensic analysis and a DNA test on all the seized articles.
• There was no “plausible explanation” for the discovery of the victim’s body in the accused’s flat.
• The accused has committed a heinous crime with aminor, and the whole act suggests a “barbarous act of lusty mind”.
• The accused has criminal antecedents and has five other cases registered against him, and was previously convicted for the offence punishable under the IPC.

• The case examined from both the offender’s and the offence’s point of view leads to a conclusion that this is a case which must fall in the “rarest of rare category”.
• The sovereign objective of sentencing remains the assurance that crime meets its just end, satisfying the cry for justice of both the victim and the collective conscience of society.
• The courts must engage in a delicate balancing act, weighing the totality of circumstances.
• There is no reason to deviate from the well-reasoned findings given by the trial court in imposing the death penalty on the accused.

Background

• The girl went missing on September 24, 2024, following which the parents first tried to search for their daughter in the locality and then lodged a missing-person report with the police.
• Subsequently, the dead body of the victim was recovered on September 26, 2024, from the flat where the accused resided, along with his mother and sister.

• The victim was found in a white plastic tank kept in the bathroom of that flat, along with some blood stained clothes-articles.
• It came to record that the minor was subjected to sexual assault and died due to injuries in the pelvic region.

Arguments

• Senior advocate Sanjay K Agrawal, representing the accused, argued that the offence might have been done by someone else as his client was not the owner of the flat from where the victim’s dead body was recovered.
• Agrawal requested the reversal of capital punishment to a lesser one, poiting that that his client belongs to the labour class and is a married person with a wife and children.
• He further emphasised that capital punishment will certainly ruin the lives of his family members too and argued that they may be treated as mitigating circumstances in favour of the accused.
• Public prosecutor Nitin Gupta, on the contrary, argued that, looking to the nature of the crime committed in a “barbarous manner”, age of the victim, injuries caused by the accused and robust evidence available against him, the case falls under the “rarest of rare” category.