Rajasthan High Court: Applying the principle of rarest of rare case, the Court upheld the decision of trial Court and confirmed death sentence awarded to the accused for committing rape and murder of 8-year-old girl.
The present case was filed by the State of Rajasthan for confirmation of the capital punishment awarded by the learned District & Sessions Judge, Pratapgarh vide judgment dated 18.9.2015 in Sessions Case No.149/2013 to the accused for committing offence under Section 302 Penal Code and under Section 3 read with Section 4 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012.
The Court stated that the accused has crushed all the parameters of trust by committing rape and murder of a 8 year old yound girl who treated accused as maternal uncle. It is also evident that the deceased tried to resist but helpless girl was killed by the accused appellant, therefore, it is not only a case of murder and harassing sexually of young girl of 8 years but it is a case in which all the parameters of trust are crushed by the accused. The accused murdered helpless minor girl only to satisfy his physical desire.
The Court upon consideration of the entire evidences and the fact that accused has crushed all limits of trust and committed offence under Section 302 IPC and under the provisions of POCSO Act, confirmed death sentence awarded by the learned trial court. [State vs Prahlad, 2016 SCC OnLine Raj 5842, decided on September 1, 2016]
Considering the overwhelming number of such cases wherein either the Supreme Court has commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment or executive clemency has spared the convict’s life, it seems highly improbable that the death sentence will be actually carried out.
The Apex court in Sangeet v. State of Haryana [(2013) 2 SCC 452.] had observed that capital sentencing has become judge-centric and there was little or no uniformity in application of rarest of rare principle. In fact, the bench seemed to even concede that categorizing crimes — the basis for ranking them and assessing which all meet the “rarest of rare” standard — might be difficult.