Punjab: A father who raped and murdered his six-year-old daughter has been saved from the gallows after the Punjab and Haryana High Court commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment. A bench of Justices Gurvinder Singh Gill and Jasjit Singh Bedi gave the direction after it held that the case does not fall in the ‘rarest of rare’ category for which death penalty should be awarded. The bench upheld the conviction of the Amritsar district and sessions judge under Section 302 of the IPC and Section 6 of the POCSO Act, but modified the sentence. “Though there is no doubt about the brutal and heinous nature of the crime committed by the accused, who is none other than the father of the deceased, the fact remains that he has no criminal history, hails from a poor socio-economic background and his conduct inside the prison has been satisfactory. Besides, he was 35 years of age at the time of the offence.
Therefore, the instant case cannot be put in the category of ‘rarest of rare cases’ in which there is no option but to impose death penalty,” the bench said. The prosecution’s case was that the accused took his minor daughter away from her mother on the evening of January 4, 2020. The next morning, she was raped, strangulated and hung from a tree in a clear attempt to mislead the investigation. “When it is established beyond doubt that the accused was seen with the deceased and that he took her away from her mother on the previous evening, the onus as per the Evidence Act was on him to explain how she was raped and murdered. He is not able to discharge the said onus, as he has neither offered any explanation in his statement (before the court) under Section 313 of the CrPC nor by adding any evidence in defence,” the high court said.
The bench concluded that the prosecution has clearly and unambiguously established an unbroken chain of circumstantial evidence proving his guilt. The judgment said: “It is evident that the prosecution has been able to clearly, cogently and unambiguously establish that the chain of circumstantial evidence is complete so that there remains no doubt that the deceased, aged six years, who was none other than the daughter of the accused, was taken away by the accused between 3 and 4 p.m. on January 4, 2020. She was raped and murdered on the next morning and the accused has been unable to offer any explanation as to what had happened to her after he took away her.”
