Young age of rape, murder victim cannot be sole ground to impose death penalty: Supreme Court

Young age of a murder and rape victim cannot be the sole ground to impose death penalty on the convict, the Supreme Court recently said while commuting the death penalty of a man held guilty of rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl, to life imprisonment (Irappa Sidappa Murgannavar v State of Karnataka)..In this regard, the Court placed reliance on its judgment in Shatrughna Baban Meshram v. State of Maharashtra in which 67 judgments of the top court in the previous 40 years had been surveyed wherein death sentence had been imposed by the trial court or the High Court in cases of rape and murder.Out of 67 cases, at least in 51 cases the victims were aged below 12 years. In 12 out of those 51 cases, the death sentence was initially awarded. However, in 3 cases the death sentence was commuted to life sentence in review."It appears from the above data that low age of the victim has not been considered as the only or sufficient factor by this Court for imposing a death sentence. If it were the case, then all, or almost all, 67 cases would have culminated in imposition of sentence of death on the accused," the Court held.A Bench of Justices L Nageswara Rao, Sanjiv Khanna and BR Gavai, therefore, said that the instant case was not a 'rarest of the rare' case and the courts below did not take into account the mitigating factors.."It has been rightly pointed out by the counsel for the appellant that the trial court merely noticed that the appellant was of young age (23 / 25 years) belonging to a very poor family, but has not considered these as mitigating factors. The High Court has noted that there are no mitigating circumstances at all. We find this observation incorrect," the Court stated. .The judgment was delivered on an appeal filed by accused Irappa Siddappa Murgannavar against a judgment of the Karnataka High Court.The appellant was accused of kidnapping, rape and murder of a five-year old-girl in the village of Khanapur in Karnataka. Post the incident, the appellant had put the body of the victim in a bag and thrown it in a stream.The appellant was held guilty of offences of rape and murder by the Sessions Court which imposed death penalty on him. The Karnataka High Court confirmed the same leading to the present appeal before the top court..The Supreme Court upheld the conviction but noted that High Court was in contravention of Section 235(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure since it failed to provide a separate hearing to the accused on sentencing. .To remedy the same, the Bench took note of the mitigating factors that included young age of the accused, lack of criminal antecedents, the non pre-planned nature of the offence and socio-economic background. Further, the Court also observed the appellant-accused has been on death row for about ten years and his conduct in jail was stated as 'satisfactory' by the jail authorities..In view of the same, the Court concluded that life imprisonment would be sufficient punishment for the accused.."There is no doubt that the appellant has committed an abhorrent crime, and for this we believe that incarceration for life will serve as sufficient punishment and penitence for his actions, in the absence of any material to believe that if allowed to live he poses a grave and serious threat to the society, and the imprisonment for life in our opinion would also ward off any such threat. We believe that there is hope for reformation, rehabilitation, and thus the option of imprisonment for life is certainly not foreclosed and therefore acceptable," the Court ruled..The Court, therefore, commuted the death sentence to lifetime imprisonment but also made it clear that the appellant-accused shall not be entitled to premature release or remission for at least 30 years. .[Read Judgment]