On the mother’s role, it accepted she resisted the search and switched off the electricity when villagers tried to enter the house.
The Punjab and Haryana High Court has commuted the death sentence awarded to a man for the rape and murder of a five-and-a-half-year-old daughter of his employer in Haryana’s Palwal in 2028, directing that he remain in prison for the rest of his natural life without any remission to “safeguard the other girls on the street from the pervertedness of the convict”.
A bench of Justices Anoop Chitkara, however, acquitted the convict’s mother, who had been sentenced to seven years by the trial court, while observing that she was only “trying to protect her Raja beta”, for which she cannot be punished under the IPC.
Holding that rigorous imprisonment till natural death without remission was proportionate to the crime, the bench observed the murder was not a premeditated act but “because of panic to destroy the evidence of rape”. The girl was five years, seven months and 14 days old when she was raped and killed on May 31, 2018, by the convict, an employee of her father who ran a small tent installation business. The girl’s father and the convict had gone to install a tent a short distance away from.
The convict went to his employer’s to get lunch for the victim’s father. While returning, the girl accompanied him. As the girl’s father took a nap, the convict took the girl to his home, where he raped her and then stabbed her multiple times with a kitchen knife and hid the body in a container where his mother used to store flour. The judges noted the victim’s age, the fact of rape and murder were undisputed… The doctor who conducted the post-mortem stated on oath that “the possibility of subjecting the deceased to rape, sexual assault can’t be ruled out”.
The court found the chain of circumstances complete: villagers saw the convict taking the girl by the hand towards his house, he gave a false explanation to the father that he had dropped her at “the plant”, and the child’s body was recovered from a drum inside the compound of his house. Bloodstains on the drum and a nearby stone matched the victim’s DNA. While DNA from the victim was not found on the convict’s Virender’s clothes and semen could not be detected on swabs or her clothing, the bench held these gaps were not fatal, given the strength of other evidence.
In its December 23 verdict, the court, while opining that “murder was because of panic to destroy evidence and not a premeditated act”, held that “the convict’s life should not be taken away by the judicial process, and instead, to save the children and females, he can be incapacitated by imposing a suitable sentence”. In deciding against the death penalty, the bench surveyed SC rulings in similar child rape-murder cases.