SC pulls up HC for acquitting rapist

“Criminal justice unfortunately became a casualty in this case when the high court side-stepped all such circumstances and exonerated the culprit of such a grotesque crime,” observed justice Thomas, while setting aside the verdict of the high court and allowing an appeal by the Maharashtra government.

Referring to the manner in which the accused first lured the child to a lonely place and then rapedand killed her, the bench said "we would have concurred with the trial court’s view that the extreme penalty of death can be chosen for such a crime….".

The court awarded him life sentence keeping in mind that the accused was once acquitted by the high court but observed "this case is perilously near the region of the `rarest of the rare cases’ envisaged by the constitution bench" in which death penalty could be imposed.

The rapist, who was known to the family of the child Gangu, had abducted her from the house and taken her to a field at Arvi in Wardha district. He dumped the body in the field where pulses and cotton were cultivated after committing the crime on December 22, 1995.

The sessions court convicted the accused and passed the death penalty against him, but a division bench of Bombay High Court acquitted him disbelieving most of the evidence gathered by police in the case.

Weighing the evidence in the case, the Apex Court said the division bench of the high court was not disposed to relyon the evidence of the three witnesses who claimed to have seen the accused and the child together though their evidence was found reliable by the trial court.

"Nor did the high court concur with the sessions court’s finding regarding recovery of the dead body as a sequel to the information supplied by the accused," justice Thomas said and added that the high court even side-stepped the medical evidence against the accused.

"But unfortunately the division bench of the high court did not rely on the above circumstances on a very fragile reasoning," he said.

Justice Thomas said "the reason by which the testimony of those three witnesses had been jettisoned by the division bench were fatuous and we cannot support them."