Abolish Death Penalty India: March 2025

Monday, March 31, 2025

Andhra Pradesh - Man awarded capital punishment for murdering minor girl in Andhra

PTI Updated: April 01, 2025 20:38 IST

Anakapalli (Andhra Pradesh), Apr 1 (PTI) The Chodavaram court in Anakapalli district on Tuesday sentenced a 31-year-old man to death for the brutal murder of a seven-year-old girl from Devarapalli. The judgment was announced by the 9th Additional District Judge K Ratna Kumar.

In 2015, G Shekhar Subhachari, with a history of petty offenses and family disputes, horrified the community by cutting the young girl’s throat with a beer bottle, sparking a lengthy investigation. "The court convicted the accused, sentencing him to death and imposing a Rs 10,000 fine, with Rs 9,000 to be paid to the victim’s mother," said Additional Public Prosecutor U Venkata Rao.

The court recommended the District Legal Services Authority provide additional compensation to the victim’s family and sent proceedings to the Andhra Pradesh High Court for death sentence confirmation.

"This verdict will raise awareness on child offenses. The investigation team did a great job, and the judge’s decision led to the death penalty," said Shravani, DSP, Ankapalli district.

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)

Source: https://www.theweek.in/wire-updates/national/2025/04/01/lgm3-ap-court-capital-punishment.html

Friday, March 28, 2025

West Bengal - Jalpaiguri man sentenced to death for killing cousin in 2021

29 March 2025

Summary

A Jalpaiguri court in West Bengal has sentenced a man to death for stabbing his cousin to death in March 2021. The victim, identified as Shankar Das, was attacked by his cousin Suresh Roy at a tea stall in the Shanti Nagar area. During the attack, Roy stabbed Das at least 18 times with a sharp weapon, killing him on the spot in broad daylight. The violence shocked the local community, and after hearing testimony from multiple witnesses over the course of the trial, the court deemed the murder to be among the “rarest of rare” cases and imposed the death penalty on Roy.

Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/jalpaiguri-man-sentenced-to-death-for-killing-cousin-in-2021/articleshow/119712871.cms?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Thursday, March 27, 2025

Ludhiana shocker: Man gets death sentence for rape-murder of 4-yr-old

By Tarsem Singh Deogan

Published on: Mar 28, 2025 09:18 am IST

The court additional session judge (fast track special court under POCSO Act), Ludhaina, has awarded death penalty to a 28-year-old man from Uttar Pradesh for the rape and murder of a four-year-old girl

Sonu Singh, who got death penalty for raping and killing a 4-year-old girl in Ludhiana.

Ludhiana : The court additional session judge (fast track special court under POCSO Act), Ludhaina, has awarded death penalty to a 28-year-old man from Uttar Pradesh for the rape and murder of a four-year-old girl. Additional session judge Amar Jeet Singh found the accused, Sonu Singh, guilty of committing the crime. The court has sentenced the accused to death under Section 302 (murder) of the IPC and Section 6 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. The court has also imposed a fine of ₹5.5 lakh on the accused and ordered compensation of ₹10 lakh to the victim’s family.

According to the prosecution, the accused, who was known to the victim’s family and was a guest in their neighbourhood, lured the girl with a chocolate and raped her on December 28, 2023. After committing the crime, the accused dumped the victim’s body in a bed box at the house of his relatives and fled.The police had registered a first information report (FIR) a day after the crime (December 29, 2023) at the Daba police station in Ludhiana, when the victim’s body was found. The accused was arrested 20 days later from Fatehpur in Uttar Pradesh.

In its judgment, the court described the crime as “rarest of rare” and stated that the accused’s actions were depraved and deserved only one sentence — death. The court observed that the victim was an innocent child, and that the crime had shocked the conscience of the society. “The victim was an innocent girl, defence-less and unprotected. The despicable nature of the offense shocks the conscience of the entire society. Even in ordinary criminal terminology, rape is a crime more heinous than murder as it destroys the very soul of a hapless woman. Such criminals are a danger to society and are beyond reformation and rehabilitation,” the court said in its order.The court also noted that the accused had shown no remorse for his actions and tried to justify his crime by claiming that he was under the influence of liquor.

The police had submitted a chargesheet in a court detailing the circumstances of the crime. The chargesheet stated that the accused took away the victim after giving her a chocolate, and then raped and murdered her. The police had also recovered CCTV footage that showed the accused taking the victim away. The autopsy report had confirmed that the victim died due to asphyxia caused by throttling, and that there were signs of forced penetration. The DNA of the accused had also matched with the vaginal swabs of the victim.

Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/chandigarh-news/ludhiana-shocker-man-gets-death-sentence-for-rape-murder-of-4yrold-101743104350301.html#google_vignette

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Uttar Pradesh - Three men sentenced to death in India for 1981 caste massacre

19 March 2025

Saiyed Moziz Imam

BBC Hindi

A court in India has sentenced three men to death for the 1981 murder of 24 people from the Dalit (formerly untouchable) community.

The men were part of a gang of bandits who shot the victims, including women and children, in Dehuli village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The special court said on Tuesday that the killings fell into the "rarest of the rare" category, which justifies capital punishment in India. The men, who insist they are innocent, can appeal against the sentence in a higher court. All the victims were from the Dalit community, which sits at the bottom of India's rigid caste hierarchy. Relatives of the victims have welcomed the sentence but say the decision should have come earlier.

Two of the three men appeared at the Special Court in Mainpuri district on Tuesday

"Justice came very late to us. The accused have lived their lives," said Sanjay Chaudhry, whose cousin was killed in the firing. Thirteen of the 17 men accused in the case have died in the 44 years since the crime was committed. Apart from the three men who have been sentenced to death, there is one more accused, who is absconding. The crime took place on 18 November 1981, when 17 men - most of them from the upper caste - wearing police uniforms stormed Dehuli and started shooting at villagers.

According to the police complaint registered at the time, the violence followed the murder of a Dalit member of the robbers' gang by his upper-caste colleagues. The gang members then attacked the village because they suspected that some Dalit villagers were providing information to the police in the murder case. The survivors of the massacre have vivid memories of the day.

"I was doing household chores when suddenly the firing started," says Rakesh Kumar, a witness who was a teenager at the time.

"I was hiding behind a stack of paddy and when I came out, I saw that many people, including my mother, were shot," he said.

Mr Kumar's mother Chameli Devi, now 80, was hit by a bullet in her leg while running from the gunfire.

"They did not spare anyone, including women or children," she said. "Whoever they found was killed."

The firing lasted for more than four hours and the attackers fled the scene before the police arrived, according to media reports. The crime led to an exodus of Dalits from Dehuli, and the local administration sent police personnel to the village, where they stayed for months in a bid to reassure people. It also triggered a political uproar, and then prime minister Indira Gandhi had visited Dehuli to meet the victims. In 1984, the case was transferred from a district court to the Allahabad Sessions Court on the orders of the state's high court. The trial continued there on and off until 2024, when the case was shifted to the special court in Mainpuri which found the men guilty. It's not unusual for courts in India to take decades to finish hearing a case and deliver a verdict, especially when the victims are from disadvantaged communities. In 2023, a 90-year-old man was sentenced for life in prison for a caste crime that also took place in 1981.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2e1kp5l70o

Sunday, March 9, 2025

Telangana court orders death sentence to 1, life term for 6 in 2018 hate killing

By Srinivasa Rao Apparasu

Published on: Mar 10, 2025 08:51 pm IST

The court in its judgement concluded that the murder was carried out at the behest of a businessman who could not digest his daughter’s marriage with a Dalit Christian.

Pranay Kumar (left) was hacked to death in broad day light in front of his mother and pregnant wife Amrutha Varshini (right) in Telangana’s Miryalaguda town on September 14, 2018. (File Photo)

Hyderabad: A special court in Telangana’s Nalgonda on Monday sentenced a contract killer to death and six others to life imprisonment in the 2018 hate murder of a Dalit man in Miryalaguda town. The victim, 23-year-old Pranay Kumar, was hacked to death with a machete in broad day light on September 14, 2018, when he was coming out of a government hospital at Miryalaguda town after a medical checkup of his pregnant wife Amrutha Varshini (20) along with his mother. He died on the spot, and the incident was captured on CCTV cameras, causing public outrage. The second additional sessions court dealing with the cases of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, in its judgement, concluded that the murder was carried out at the behest of Amrutha Varshini’s father Tirunagari Maruthi Rao, a prominent Vysya businessman in the town, who could not digest his daughter’s marriage with a Dalit Christian.

Maruthi Rao, who was named accused No. 1 (A-1) in the case, died by suicide in March 2020, reportedly due to fear of conviction, when the trial was going on. The court sentenced the A-2 in the case — Subhash Kumar Sharma, a contract killer from Bihar — to death. The other six accused - Asghar Ali (A-3), Abdul Bari (A-4), M A Kareem (A-5), Shravan Kumar (A-6), Shiva (A-7) and Nizam (A-8) were sentenced to life imprisonment. While Abdul Karim was a local Congress leader who introduced supari killers Asghar Ali and Mohd Bari, who were suspected to have links with ISI of Pakistan, to Maruthi Rao, Shiva was the car driver who carried the killers and Nizam was an associate of Subhash Sharma, who was the actual killer. Maruthi Rao younger brother, Shravan Kumar, who was a co-conspirator in the case who allegedly arranged the meeting between Maruthi Rao and the supari gang, pleaded for leniency, citing family responsibilities and denying involvement in the crime. “I have no direct involvement with the murder. Please grant me pardon for the sake of my two school-going children,” Shravan Kumar said. Police had arrested the seven persons, who were hired by Maruthi Rao for a supari of ₹1 crore, within four days after the murder that triggered state-wide outrage. Subhash Sharma was arrested by the Nalgonda police from his native place Samastipur in Bihar and was brought to Telangana after securing a transit warrant from the local court.

The court pronounced its judgement after a prolonged trial for five years and nine months, involving examination of forensic evidence, post-mortem reports and testimonies of witnesses. It examined 102 witnesses and recorded their statements. The police department, under the supervision of the then Nalgonda superintendent of police (SP) A V Ranganath, conducted a detailed investigation and prepared a 1,600-page charge sheet. The investigation confirmed the involvement of eight accused in the murder, and the charge sheet was filed on June 12, 2019. IPS officer Ranganath, who is presently commissioner of Hyderabad Assets Monitoring and Protection Agency (HYDRAA), said the convicts in Pranay Kumar’s murder employed advanced technology to execute the crime intelligently. “Initially, there was significant confusion in the case, and Maruthi Rao also pretended to be unaware of any involvement,” he said. He further revealed that the case was cracked within three days of launching the investigation. “I am happy that the second accused has received the death penalty, while the other accused were sentenced to life imprisonment. Truth always prevails, no matter how much one tries to suppress it,” he said.

The Nalgonda police had registered the case based on a complaint given by Pranay Kumar’s father Perumalla Balaswamy. Pranay Kumar and Amrutha, who lived in the same neighbourhood in Miryalaguda town had been friends since childhood. Kumar was looking for a job when he married Amrutha in January 2018, much against her parents’ wishes. Their marriage had led to serious disputes between the two families, and multiple complaints were filed with the police. However, Amrutha stood by Pranay and stated in front of the police that she would live with him. She suspected her father Maruthi Rao to be the mastermind behind the crime. Pranay Kumar’s parents Balaswamy and Premalatha paid tributes at his grave after the verdict. “We have lost a lot with Pranay’s murder. Such hate killings are deeply saddening. This verdict should serve as a deterrent to stop such heinous crimes,” Balaswamy told reporters.

Social activist V Sandhya called the verdict a victory for people’s movements and justice. “The police and courts should continue their commitment to delivering justice in similar cases,” she said. Among the convicts, Subhash Sharma remained in jail as he was denied bail, while Asghar Ali was already in prison for another case. The other accused had secured bail and were out during the trial.

Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyle/fashion/not-nita-ambani-natasha-poonawalla-owns-rs-126-crore-rare-pink-diamond-ring-that-once-belonged-to-queen-of-france-101766371955581.html

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