Abolish Death Penalty India: Rathi family murder case- President commutes death sentence to life for Gehlot (Maharashtra)

Thursday, December 20, 2018

Rathi family murder case- President commutes death sentence to life for Gehlot (Maharashtra)

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Updated: Nov 5, 2016, 07:50 AM IST

One of the two men convicted for Maharashtra’s most sensational case of cold blooded murder of seven people has escaped gallows and the other is quite hopeful.

In a rarest of rare case, the President of India has commuted the death sentence of convict Jeetendra Nainsingh Gehlot who robbed and killed seven people-- six members of Pune’s Rathi family including a pregnant woman, two children and their house servant in 1994. His accomplice Narayan Chetanram Chaudhary, may also get relief from gallows against his claim of being a “juvenile” at the time of the incident. Chaudhary has withdrawn his mercy plea and has instead demanded verification of his documents to prove his claim.

In August 2015, soon after the execution of Bombay blast convict Yakub Memon the home ministry had recommended to the President to reject Gehlot’s mercy plea. However, in a communication dated October 5, 2016, the president has “commuted the death sentence of the condemned prisoner to life imprisonment with a condition that the prisoner shall remain in prison for the whole of the remainder of his natural life and there shall be no further remission of the term of his imprisonment for life by any authority.”

The President’s order has already been communicated to the convict who is currently lodged in Nagpur jail.The President since 2012 has so rejected 26 mercy petitions, including that of 1993 Mumbai blasts convict Yakub Memon, who was hanged on July 30,2015. Prior to this he has commuted the death sentence of only Man Bahadur Dewan from Assam’s Dibrugarh district, convicted of killing his wife, two sons and a neighbour.

The incident..

On August 26, 1994, after lunch with family, Sanjay Rathi then 26 years old and his brother-in-law left for some business-related work. While his father was at the sweet mart, his younger brother was in Mumbai and the other family members were at home. In the evening, when he returned after work, his father told him he’s been trying to call home but there was no answer. Since his wife was pregnant, he assumed they must have gone to the doctor. He reached home soon after.

When no one opened the door on ringing the bell several times, he sent someone to the shop to fetch duplicate keys. When he entered the house, there was no one in the drawing room, which was strange. As he started checking rooms, he discovered his family members in a pool of blood. The victims, investigation revealed, were stabbed to death by convict Narayan Chetanaram Chaudhary, Jitu Nayansingh Gehlot and Rajusingh Rajpurohit. The convicts had also killed the maid servant during the pre-planned theft and murder.

Main suspect Narayan Chetanram Chaudhary was arrested on September 5, 1994, almost 10 days after the murders while another key suspect, Jitendra alias Jitu Nayansingh Gehlot, was arrested on November 21, 1994 and Raju Rajpurohit was arrested on October 15, 1994, from different places in Rajasthan. Rajpurohit turned police approver and walked away with lesser punishment.

The victims

Meera Rathi, aged 45, her daughter-in-law Babita alias Nita Rathi, 24, her daughter Preeti, 19, Meera's married daughter Hemlata, 27, Chirag, Babita's two-and-a-half-year-old son, Pratik, Hemlata's one-and-a-half-year-old son and family's maid servant Satyabhamabai Sutar.

TIME LINE

August 26, 1994: Convicts killed seven members of Rathi household
February 1998: Trial Court awarded death sentence to both the convicts
July 1999: Bombay High Court upheld the death penalty
September 2000: SC upheld the death penalty
2004: Convicts filed mercy petition
2007: Maharashtra governor rejected the mercy petition
2012: files got burnt in the Mantralya fire
August 2015: Home ministry pulled up Maharashtra home department for delay in sending the file
October 2016: President commuted the death sentence into life imprisonment.

Source: https://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-dna-exclusive-rathi-family-murder-case-president-commutes-death-sentence-to-life-for-gehlot-2270329 (Accessed 20 December 2018)

1 comment:

AmolOctober 22, 2022 at 3:21 AM
Huh! You really think this person deserves mercy or be pardoned,He should be hanged and sent to the gallows .. as fast as possible but just see what shameless mockery of justice takes place in our country!
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The Death Penalty Scenario in India

India is one of the 193 countries that retains death penalty. There has always been a few imminent judges who have pronounced compelling verdicts upholding the rights of prisoners on death row. There has been increasing debate in various platforms advocating abolition of death penalty or at least to rethink sentencing policies in India. The Indian government has however always been committed to the retention of the death penalty, irrespective of their political ideology. India has voted against a United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) draft resolution on the use of death penalty, saying it goes against the statutory law of the country where an execution is carried out in the "rarest of rare" cases. India retains the death penalty as punishment for a number of crimes including murder, kidnapping, terrorism, desertion, inducement to suicide of a minor or a mentally-retarded person and has more recently in 2013 come to include the offence of rape in certain circumstances. Most recently, there is an outrage over child rape and murder.

After observing an unofficial moratorium of 8 years in India, the Indian Government in November 2012 carried out the execution of Ajmal Kasab, convicted in the Mumbai attacks case, without public knowledge. This was followed by the secret execution of Afzal Guru, convicted in the Parliament attack case of 2001, in February 2013, under similar circumstances, without intimating his immediate family or affording a chance of judicial review. In both cases, the executions were carried out under covert operations conducted by the Government immediately upon rejection of their mercy petitions. Before these executions, the last execution to be carried out in India was that of Dhananjoy Chatterjee in 2004 who was convicted of rape and murder and which sentence was carried out after he had spent 13 years in solitary confinement. Following this, several mercy petitions of death row convicts have come to be rejected. The fear of execution of such convicts is imminent. Bolstered by the Government's unapologetic conduct and public outcry, especially in recent cases of rape and murder reported in the country, the courts are continuing to hand down death sentences at an alarming rate.

In the recent past, there have been a few empirical studies (mainly four) conducted with prisoners on death row. This has highlighted the situation of prisoners on death row.

(1) Most recently the India Exclusion Report 2017-18 found that fair trial rights and guarantees are reduced to a nullity and seeks to breach the citadel of the collective silence. It further said that Convicts on death row in India belong to groups marginalised along the axes of caste, religion, economic vulnerability and educational deprivation, and their fair trial rights, though a part of the Right to Life guaranteed by the Constitution, are invariably non-existent, a survey of 371 out of the 385 persons living under the death sentence and their families has revealed.

(2) Another study was The Death Penalty Research Project (2015) which was conceived with an aim to document the socio-economic profile of prisoners sentenced to death in India and map their experience within the criminal justice system.

There were two other academic studies that were done conducted by Dr. Reena Mary George –

(3)“Voices of prisoners surviving the death row in India” (2014) done through the University of Vienna under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Christoph Reinprecht (Sociology) and Prof. Dr. Manfred Nowak (Law and Ex-United Nations Rapporteur on Torture). George’s research highlights three salient features, namely: poverty, social exclusion and marginalisation are antecedent to death penalty; death penalty is a constructed account by the state machinery; and prisoners on death row situate dignity higher in the juxtaposition of death and dignity.

(4) Another one “Death Penalty – A Human Rights Perspective” (2009) done through the University of Mumbai under the guidance of Retired Justice Hosbet Suresh. This was a study in Maharashtra with the objectives to firstly study the impact of death penalty on the social, mental, and physical being of the inmate and secondly, to study the perception of opinion leaders on death penalty with reference to human rights. All the above reports are public documents.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, Prison Statistics 2015, there are 101 prisoners sentenced to death. The actual figure of sentences originally awarded is much higher considering the death sentences of 49 convicts came to be commuted to life imprisonment in the said period. As of today, almost in 2019, the figures are unknown through government statistics, however, research centres claim this figure to be around 371 convicts. During the 1980s the Supreme Court sought to restrict the use of the death penalty by characterizing it as a punishment reserved only for the “rarest of the rare” cases. The doctrine has not had the desired effect. According to a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court, Rajindar Sachar: “after the rarest of rare doctrine was introduced in 1980, the Supreme Court confirmed death penalty in 40 per cent of cases in the period 1980-90 while it was 37.7 per cent between 1970 and 1980. For the high courts it rose from 59 per cent in 1970-80 to 65 per cent during 1980-90”. Over the past two decades the death penalty has been extended to include more crimes and been handed down with increasing frequency.

Most recently while commuting a sentence in Supreme Court (2018), Justice Joseph did not seek the reconsideration of the Bachan Singh judgment, but only sought to re-examine the purpose and practice of the death penalty, and whether as a punishment, it serves any goal at all. In other words, the death penalty can continue to remain constitutionally valid because of the Bachan Singh judgment, but its application in substantive cases coming before the court must be restricted to only those cases which meet the criteria laid down in that case.

While updating the blog and conducting my own empirical studies, I observed the heinous nature of the crimes that were committed and thought about the families, about their loss, about the victims who for no fault of their own died. If I lost my relative or a dear friend, would I still oppose death penalty and would I still advocate to abolish the death sentence? Having worked in the criminal justice system and also having the seen the other side, where often it is the marginalized, vulnerable and oppressed who are on death row makes me want to advocate for abolition of this punishment. Victims should definitely get justice for their loss, for their pain. No one should escape the rule of law. As long as humanity exists; crime will exist. Should we not re-consider our sentencing policies?

Reena Mary George